SQL and MS Word

Well what it is you want is called Mail Merge and while it was a very common thing a while ago when Word Perfect was the WP of choice this is no longer taught or covered in teaching students how to use MS products as it is now considered as an "Advanced Procedure."

Just go to the help in Office and look up Mail Merge I'm not exactly sure how it works with MS Office as I still use Word Perfect Office as it's just so much better but there should be directions in the Help file for this.

Col

MS Access is really the best tool to do automated form generation in this manner. You have your links to all the back end SQL tables in one place to minimize maintenance of data sources, can create multiple queries with various filters/parameter sources (e.g. "pick a customer" + "pick a form" + "pick various options for form" (e.g. hide sections/fields, etc.)) depending on different needs and then create and use Access reports as your templates. You can then automate the export of those reports to .rtf format (Word) and autolaunch of Word itself if you want the user to be able to further modify the resulting document after the data is pulled via macro or vb code.

Access also has a very easy to use label/mailing envelope wizard that you can also automate via macro/code.

There are probably many ways of accomplishing such a task. However, one that could work for you would be to use some VBA behind the doc.

You would need to create a form which would provide a list of clients drawn from the database. The forms available via the VBA/macro environment behind word are not as powerful as Access forms but you can create form with a combo control and populate it with data from a recordset.

The form and database query would be activated using a custom toolbar button after the template doc is opened.

Then all you need is an On-Click event which creates another recordset based on the selected client and inserts the contents of the recordset (ie address details) into the doc. Finally the user would simply finish with a "save as".

This describes the broad methodology I have used to populate an excel spreadsheet (data and graphs) - I'm sure the principles can be applied to word.

Hope this helps.