Infopath form data import to Access

Hi all,

I'm a newbie to this forum so greetings to all :)

I am trying to set up a quote system using an Infopath form which saves the quotes as an xml file, then I want to import the xml into Access in order to keep a track of them, provide reporting functions and also to have a mail merge with a Word doc to then save a pdf quote for the client.

I thought this would be a simple process and it is to a degree but I hit a snag when the xml imports the quote data into separate tables which ruins the mail merge for the word doc. The word doc merge can only be done with one table at a time. This being an important part of the process, I want to make sure the merge can work well.

Another problem is xml not being able to be linked in Access, which leads me to using Excel holding a link to the xml then using Access to hold another linked table to the Excel sheet. Is it me or does this seem silly? (I'm sure a lot of you could go on about this!). This is not an ideal set up but it seems to work ok apart from the element names being imported along with the xml data - "ns1:QuoteNumber" and "ns1:InternalExternal" and so on... Is there a way to avoid importing these element names into Excel?

Please also note that I am not a developer! I am using Office 2010 and am familiar with xml, html css etc... Would anyone have some suggestions? Am I on the right track?:confused: