Hi, Karen:
Here's the issue/problem that I see with what you want to do...specifically 3a and 3b and 4.
You say that the form templates would be "prebuilt and available" in MS Word -- therefore, these are WORD templates or .DOT files. This is a proprietary Microsoft Format. SAS knows how to read proprietary Excel files and proprietary Microsoft Access (.mdb) files -- but Word is a document -- not a representation of a data source.
So, for this reason while you CAN "push" the data out of EG (by using ODS CSV) and you can build the documents using Word and the MERGE capability of Microsoft Office. You cannot "pull the completed forms back into EG." The completed forms will be Word documents....in Microsoft Word proprietary format.
To see what Microsoft Word documents look like, perform the following experiment. Go to MS Word. Type a paragraph of text into the document. Save the file as a .DOC file; then close Word. Next, open Notepad and navigate to the location where you saved the Word Doc. Open the .DOC file with Notepad. Much of the file will be unreadable because it is stored in proprietary format. SAS cannot read MS Word .DOC files. So, this fact makes your 3a not really possible. After your MERGE documents have been created in Word, you will not be able to "pull the completed forms back into EG".
OK...now let's look at possibility 3b: Pull the template from MSWord into EG and fill it in in EG. Again. the mail-merge template document is a proprietary Word document. So for the same reasons that you could not pull the merged forms into EG, you can't pull the mail-merge template into EG and just "fill it in".
Now, let's look at #4. I agree with what you said that EG is very good at making PDFs -- but WHAT is EG making PDFs
from??? EG is making PDFs from the results of the EG tasks or SAS code in your project. EG isn't just acting as a front end to Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Distiller for all purpose PDF creation.
EG (and ODS) need for SAS to create output that can be routed to the ODS PDF destination. EG can't act on files that just live on your system (like .DOC files). If you have the full Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Distiller, then you may have a plug-in -- but a Word plug-in -- that would allow you to create PDF files from your Word docs. But that capability is a Word plug-in capability...because you want to turn Word documents into PDF documents. That's between Word and Adobe -- EG and ODS do not enter into the picture here....in fact...they CAN'T enter into the picture here.
So, since #3a and #3b can't happen in the EG world, #4 will not work either. EG is not technically "exporting" to PDF. Exporting, in the SAS world, implies exporting data to another format, like exporting your SAS table to Excel or Microsoft Access or Oracle format. When ODS creates a PDF file -- it is not EXPORTING output to PDF -- It is taking SAS results and producing a PDF file that contains the results of the SAS process. But the PDF can ONLY contain the results from a SAS process.
You might be able to write a VB script to start up the merge automatically and then, if you have the Adobe Acrobat plug-in for Word, you could create PDFs from the merged documents under control of the script.
But remember that even though EG is running on your local machine and Word is on your local machine -- where is SAS??? SAS is probably on a server that EG knows how to talk to. Your SAS code doesn't usually run locally -- your SAS code usually runs on the server machine. Word may or may not be on THAT machine.
Some kind of scenario like this might be possible: You create a custom task for EG -- within that custom task, you create a CSV file and return the CSV file to your local machine. Then the custom task might invoke the VB script to start up the Word mail-merge using the CSV file. And the custom task -might- be able to issue the appropriate batch commands to convert the Word document to PDF form -- BUT, the custom task would not technically be "sucking" the Word final merged documents "into EG" -- the custom task would be interacting with the files on your local machine both the EG created results and the non-EG files.
In addition to building forms in Word, I believe that Adobe Acrobat also has a way to design a PDF document that contains "fillable" areas and the data that fills in those areas is defined by XML tags that Adobe products know how to render into the form. However the Adobe PDF form route or the Word form route or the custom task route all mean that some part of your process is going to happen outside of EG and that you will not be able to keep this as a project within EG from start to finish.
And, yes, people have come up with a way to combine the power of EG with the flexibility of formatting in Word. It's called the SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office. Using the SAS add-in, you can open Word and from within Word, run a task or Wizard, just like the tasks or Wizards in EG in order to perform analysis and get results right in Word or Excel or PowerPoint (and soon, in Microsoft Outlook).
The SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office is one of the components that are available when you are using the SAS Platform for Business Analytics (also known as the BI Platform).
If you have experience with .NET or C#, then the information at this page may help you figure out whether what you want to do is possible with a custom task:
http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/guide/customtasks/index.htm
cynthia