Import .docx contents into MS Access - vba

Question

I began writing a docx document to do a project of mine.
Recently, I realized that it would be easier to manage that data if it was in a database.
So, I wanted to import that data into MS Access automatically, to avoid copying and pasting the data manually.
Is there anyway to do it? I have only encontered ways of opening Word application via Access. I also know that docx has a XML structure, so I imagine if I can open that structure, it would be easy to do a parser in VBA

Answer 1

There are two basic ways information can be taken out of a Word document and put into an Access database: automating the Word object model using VBA code running in either Word or Access OR extracting the WordOpenXML that makes up the Word document. You indicate you lean towards the second option.
Here, again, there are a number of approaches available:
Use VBA in Word or Access to extract the WordOpenXML of the document open in the Word application user interface.
Use VBA in Access together with non-VBA tools to "crack open" the Zip file and extract the XML.
Use the tools available in the .NET Framework to extract the content of the ZIP file and write it to Access using an OLE DB connection.
I understand your goal is to be able to recreate the document at a later point for printing, so you want to preserve all the formatting. In addition, you want to be able to read the content from within Access.
I believe this will require a minimum of four fields in the Access table:
ID
Title
Text of song
The complete WordOpenXML for re-creating the document
You don't mention (4) in the discussion and problem description, but if you want to store the formatting AND you want to be able to read the content I believe this is necessary. While WordOpenXML is "readable", there's a lot of mark-up in there which doesn't make reading comfortable.
All things being equal, I'd go for either VBA working on the open Word document or the .NET approach, using the Open XML SDK (free download .NET library you can reference in Visual Studio and distribute with solutions).
One important thing to keep in mind is storing the Word Open XML in the database. Unless something has changed in Access, you can't store the ZIP file - you need a "streamable" format. That would be the OOXML OPC flat-file format.
When you read the WordOpenXML from a document using VBA, that's what you get, which is why that would be an option for me. The Open XML SDK doesn't have that option, but there is code available from Eric White's blog for doing this.
When you later want to recreate and print the document it should be enough to stream the WordOpenXML to a file with the .xml extension. Or you could convert it back to a docx zip file (same blog).