I am working with a small company who is slowly moving to MS access. Currently all their reports live in multiple MS Word documents. During this transition they need to not only keep the word documents up to date, but also feed the information into the database. (Basically remove the need to double enter data).
Is there a way that I can write one global macro that can be ran on any word document, or do I need to carry over this macro to each individual document?
Yes, you can use one global macro. You can place this macro in the user's normal.dot or put it in another document. I suggest using another document because it is easier to "deploy" to multiple users. This document is placed in one of Word's "startup" locations. What you are doing is creating an "add-in".
Word Add-ins at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa189710(office.10).aspx.
"You can add functionality to a Microsoft® Word solution by creating a Word-specific add-in (also sometimes referred to as a global template)."
Office 2007 has some wonderful ways to make transfer the semantic meanings of these reports to a more specific type of data that will fit easier into a database using XML and schemas. If you want to learn more about this, go watch "Module 05 Custom XML" at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb738430.aspx Specificly the part about distributing a schema to people to allow them to "mark up" these word documents (it's really easy) so there will be less of a burden on you to import all this stuff.