Anyway of putting mergefields INTO an Excel cell

[np]

Hi all,

I'm building a school report generator using an Excel doc as my data
source and merging into a school report template in Word. The first
worksheet in my spreadsheet contains the mailmerge field headings
(firstname, subjectpronoun, object pronoun,english comment, maths
comment etc).

In the other worksheets in the workbook I generate the subject
comments by checking or unchecking multiple toggle boxes that
CONCATENATE the comments into one cell, and then writes them to the
correct student's name on the first worksheet using a drop down list
and the MATCH function.

The deal is, I want my comments to contain the mergefields already
(eg. [Firstname] is developing skills in ..."). And then when I merge
to Word I want MSWord to recognise these as mergefield headings and
treat them appropriately. I guess it's kind of a second level merge,
but I want to do it all in one hit.

I've tried copying and pasting my mergefields from Word, but Excel
treats them as text strings - I've tried paste special and using
hyperlinks etc ... no luck yet.

I 'could' write individual formulas which tests for sex etc, for all
the comment cells but there are about three hundred of them so I would
prefer another way.

Any advice?

thanks np

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I see what you're trying to do (I think), but there is simply no way to
insert the mergefields in the text in Excel in the way that you describe.

I suspect that in this case, the simplest approach would be to use Excel VBA
to generate Word content directly, possibly even doing the merge operation,
but it's difficult to judge with this kind of situation - it depends on how
much you're doing, how often, whether you are in a position to use VBA and
so on.

Peter Jamieson