Bookmarks work suspiciously well

[Joe Murphy]

My master document is a contract. The contract has lots of IF
+INCLUDETEXT fields pulling information from a heavily bookmarked
document.

The bookmarks may or may not include fields. For example, the contract
chooses from 'You're permanently employed...' and 'You're fixed
term...'. The fixed term bookmark includes a field of 'Fixed Term
Until This Date'. So the master document either gets paragraph A, or
paragraph B which includes fields.

The only quibble I've noticed is that I need to keep the bookmarks
document open and linked to the source data when I'm running the
actual merge. Are there other bumps in the road I should look out for?

Joe.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

The only quibble I've noticed is that I need to keep the bookmarks

document open and linked to the source data when I'm running the
actual merge. Are there other bumps in the road I should look out for?

I'm interested that you find you have to keep the referenced document open -
what happens if you do not (and which version of Word?)

The three main things I would say about merges with INCLUDETEXTs are
a. If you are saving the output as a new document or documents and you end
up with INCLUDETEXT fields in the output, you should consider "fixing" the
field results before saving (e.g., roughly speaking, ctrl-A then
ctrl-shift-F9 to "fix" most of the fields in the document body).
b. "what works, works". i.e. I don't know anyone who could reliably predict
what will go wrong, without actually running tests, although clearly
everyone has their own experience to go on. But in particular,
- if you have style definitions in the included and including documents
that clash, you may run into problems
- if you are developing this solution to run on other peoples' systems,
you typically have to deal with a umber of problems - including:
- ensuring the correct data source is attached
- different locations for the included bookmarked document?
- different per-user settings that may affect the behaviour of
INCLUDETEXT, possibly including registry settings to do with the behaviour
of fields that include data (depends partly on the version of Word);
possibly the user's settings for Tools|Options|... Print|Update fields,
Print|Update links, and General|Web options|Files|Update links on save.
c. test, test, test!

 

[Joe Murphy]

I'm interested that you find you have to keep the referenced document open -
what happens if you do not (and which version of Word?)

Word asks for the data source again, for each record. As there's 1300
records, my first reaction was to swear. But leaving the bookmark doc
open and linked works fine.

It's Word 2007.

The three main things I would say about merges with INCLUDETEXTs are
a. If you are saving the output as a new document or documents and you end
up with INCLUDETEXT fields in the output, you should consider "fixing" the
field results before saving (e.g., roughly speaking, ctrl-A then
ctrl-shift-F9 to "fix" most of the fields in the document body).

Good tip, cheers! I'm using Graham Mayor's excellent macro to save the
individual documents, as found on from http://www.gmayor.com/individual_merge_letters.htm
too.

b. "what works, works". i.e. I don't know anyone who could reliably predict
what will go wrong, without actually running tests, although clearly
everyone has their own experience to go on. But in particular,
- if you have style definitions in the included and including documents
that clash, you may run into problems

I had a couple of formatting problems earlier on, such as numbering
screwing up. So my bookmarks document fakes the numbers, and uses lots
of tables to ensure everything lines up in the master doc. Tables in
the bookmark document are proving really reliable.

Neither document uses styles particularly. Yet.

- if you are developing this solution to run on other peoples' systems,
you typically have to deal with a umber of problems - including:
- ensuring the correct data source is attached
- different locations for the included bookmarked document?
- different per-user settings that may affect the behaviour of
INCLUDETEXT, possibly including registry settings to do with the behaviour
of fields that include data (depends partly on the version of Word);
possibly the user's settings for Tools|Options|... Print|Update fields,
Print|Update links, and General|Web options|Files|Update links on save.

You're absolutely right. The merge is just for me, and I'd be
genuinely surprised if anyone else in the organisation knew how to
tweak any of the merge. But I certainly wouldn't like to rebuild all
those absolute filepaths.

c. test, test, test!

Good lord, yes.

Thanks. =)

Joe.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Word asks for the data source again, for each record. As there's 1300

records, my first reaction was to swear. But leaving the bookmark doc
open and linked works fine.

It's Word 2007.

Interesting - a simple example here works fine. Could be a Windows file
system permissions or network permissions thing?

 

[Joe Murphy]

Interesting - a simple example here works fine. Could be a Windows file
system permissions or network permissions thing?

It could well be a network thing, I don't really know.

Thanks again for your response. =)

Joe.