I remember calling MS support, vaguely related to this project.

For example, if the Edmonton office needed to send a welcome letter to a new client, the flow might look like this:

1. Create a new file based on X:\Templates\EdmontonLetterhead.dot

2. Insert the contents of X:\Templates\A01-ClientOnboarding.doc

3. Fill in fields. Usually stuff like client name, caseworker name, etc.

4. Click the links in the file (e.g., there'd be a link to X:\Templates\EdmontonContactNumbers.doc), printing each document and deleting the link from the final document.

5. Save the file to the client's folder (e.g., S:\Clients\000123-Jane Smith).

6. Print a copy for the paper file, a copy to mail out, and an envelope.

We called Microsoft Support because when changes were made to the template documents it would update the links to relative paths. These don't work with our flow because the document either isn't saved, or is saved on a different network drive.

Microsoft Support wasn't able to help us. They understood exactly what we were doing, exactly what the problem is, but they weren't able to fix it. That's just how Word works, it didn't have a setting to force absolute links.

I ended up writing another VB6 program, using OLE Automation to get Word to do the work, which opened each document, saved it to a local drive (which turned the relative links into absolute links), then copied it back to the shared drive.