bullet points in Access 2010 Report - vba

Question

I'm working on changing an Access 2010 report. There is a portion of the report that reads in Raw Data from a SharePoint field called "Notes" that has comments for each record. Within the "notes" field, there can be several sentences. I need to find a way to separate those sentences into a bullet point per sentence in my report.
I'm trying to come up with a clever way to do so. I can get the data entry folks to use a symbol of some sort in the raw that signifies the need for a new bullet. This way, in my Report Expression (or perhaps via VBA), I can get it separated... but how?
Any thoughts?

Answer 1

The memo data field in MS Access can be set to Rich Text as a property, so:
UPDATE Table1
SET Table1.AMemo = "<ul><li>" &
IIf(InStr([AMemo],".")>0,
Replace(Mid([AMemo],1,Len([AMemo])-1),".","</li>"),[AMemo]) & "</li></ul>"

Answer 2

In its most rudimentary form you could do something like the following. Is splits the [Notes] text on ". " and creates a separate "point" for each sentence.
Sample Data: [SharePointData]
SlideNumber Notes
----------- ------------------------------------
1 Title slide.
2 Brief overview. Just the highlights.
3 More stuff.
VBA Code:
Option Compare Database
Option Explicit
Public Function SplitNoteText(RawText As Variant) As Variant
Dim rtn As Variant, StringArray() As String, Point As Variant
Const BulletChar = "-"
rtn = Null
If Not IsNull(RawText) Then
rtn = ""
StringArray = Split(RawText, ". ", -1, vbBinaryCompare)
For Each Point In StringArray
If Len(Point) > 0 Then
If Len(rtn) > 0 Then
rtn = rtn & vbCrLf & vbCrLf
End If
rtn = rtn & BulletChar & " " & Point
If Right(Point, 1) <> "." Then
' add back the period that got "consumed" in the Split
rtn = rtn & "."
End If
End If
Next
End If
SplitNoteText = rtn
End Function
Test query:
SELECT SlideNumber, Notes, SplitNoteText(Notes) AS Points FROM SharePointData;
Results:
SlideNumber Notes Points
----------- ------------------------------------ ----------------------
1 Title slide. - Title slide.
2 Brief overview. Just the highlights. - Brief overview.
- Just the highlights.
3 More stuff. - More stuff.