[newbe]

Hi Everyone, I'm new, so please don't flame me if I'm not posting this correctly My fiance recently started a new job in a secretarial position and after her first day, I've decided her office REALLY needs to upgrade the way they do things....

Hi Everyone,

I'm new, so please don't flame me if I'm not posting this correctly

My fiance recently started a new job in a secretarial position and after her first day, I've decided her office REALLY needs to upgrade the way they do things.

First off, it's a personnel company. So they will advertise job positions and then receive applications for those jobs.

Here is the current workflow:
- email applications come in
- sec. (secretary) then opens cover letter (which is usually a .doc or .pdf)
- copies in the email body text (which is actually an auto generated one created by seek.com etc) into the new doc + page break
- opens the persons CV and copies that into the cover letter doc.
-- So basically you end up with a document that has the original email on the first page, then the applicants cover letter, followed by their CV.
- this doc is then printed
- sec. writes the date on the front page, the consultant who is looking after those applications & also L1 or L2 (see below).

THEN

Depending on if the application is a reply to an advertised job, then
Letter1 option:
- sec. replies to the email (to the applicant),
- opens the L1 template email they have saved,
- copies this template into the reply email
- edits the applicants name, the job description and the consultants name
- sends email.

OR if the application is just a general application asking for whatever work is going:
Letter2 option:
- sec. replies to the email (to the applicant),
- opens the L2 template email they have saved,
- copies this template into the reply email
- edits the applicants name
- sends email.

As you can see, this is a lot of cut & pasting. On a busy day, they may receive 100+ applications for one position. So she spends most of her day, cut & pasting stuff.

This can OBVIOUSLY be done a better way

A couple of things:
- They are using old computers (7 years +)
- Running Windows 2000 (I believe)
- Office (a really old version)

I've searched around the web and tried to find information regarding exactly what is possible with macro's but my knowledge is very limited.

I was also thinking that if they upgrade their computers, the could use OpenOffice to save upgrade costs. But if they do, would it be possible to create "something" that runs when the emails come in, runs through all the above steps across say, outlook and OpenOffice?

I'm totally open to suggestions or other idea's to achieve this.

Thanks