Collecting Data Through E-Mail

If you're running Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, you can create forms that you can send to other people in e-mail, and then automatically add the responses to a database table. You might use this to process surveys, status reports, orders, or bugs via e-mail. With a little imagination, the uses for this feature are practically unlimited.

For this process to work, the survey recipients need to have an e-mail client that supports e-mail formatted as HTML; most major e-mail clients support this.

See Also

For information about additional options and refinements you can make to e-mail surveys, see the Access Help file.

The Collect Data Through E-mail Messages wizard guides you through the process of creating an e-mail survey form. You can create different types of surveys depending on the applications that are installed on your computer.

1.	Create a database table containing the fields you want to include in your survey. Position the insertion point in the first empty record.
2.	On the External Data tab, in the Collect Data group, click the Create E-mail button.
3.	Follow the steps in the wizard to create the form, add and reorder the fields from the table, change field labels, specify the Outlook folder to which the survey results will be delivered, elect to have Outlook automatically add replies to the original Access database table, and specify the survey recipients. If you do not have Outlook add the survey responses to the database, this option, you can manually add individual survey replies to the table by right-clicking each in Outlook, and then clicking Export Data To Microsoft Office Access.
4.	Customize the text of the e-mail message that will be created, and then on the Create the e-mail message page, click Create. Troubleshooting You might see a warning that you have the database open in an exclusive locked state. Don't worry about this. You can close the database after sending the e-mail and then re-open it without the lock. Outlook starts (if it wasn't already running) and displays a generic message along with a form based on the selected table.
5.	Make any changes to the message you want, address it to the survey recipients, and then send it.

When sending a data collection e-mail message to more than one person, it is good e-mail etiquette to put your own e-mail address in the To box and other people's addresses in the Bcc box. That way, if a message recipient clicks Reply All, his or her response will go only to you, rather than to all the original recipients.

Message recipients respond to the survey by replying to your message. Outlook delivers survey responses to the Access Data Collection Replies folder (which it creates the first time you need it). You can view individual survey responses and the status of the data collection process for each in this folder, and view the survey data in the original table.

To change the way Access processes message replies, and resend or delete messages, display the table and then click the Manage Replies button in the Collect Data group.