Bulleting entries

[Harimau]

Hi there,

I am currently using Microsoft Office 2004 for Macintosh. I'm trying to use
Data Merge to create some mass letters. I have an excel spreadsheet as my
data source, with the usual contact, address, title columns... Then I also
have several boolean columns called "Report 1", "Report 2", "Report 3",
"Report 4". Each of these four columns have either 0 and 1.

What I want to do in the Document is that for each record, if the value in
"Record 1", say, is "1", then i want to insert "Report 1" in the document.
However, I also want that "Report 1" text to be bulleted. The reason is that
I want to create a bullet list for the reports that this client wants. So if
for a particular client has Report1 = 1, Report2=0, Report3=0, Report4=1 Then
i want some output like:

* Report 1
* Report 2

In the document.

Is there some sort of special code I can add to the "Insert text if true"
section when i'm using "If...Then...Else" word field when creating my merge?
Or is there a better way?

Sorry if I didn't articulate what i'm asking well enough, first time using
Mail Merge.

Thanks in advance,

Iwan J

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

An If...then...Else field construction is what you need to use. I can be
easier to construct them directly from the Keyboard (or just put some dummy
results, like A and B, or True and False if you use the Insert>Word command
facility. Then press Alt+F9 to display the field codes and modify the
results to be what you want. If you are doing it directly form the
keyboard, you must use Ctrl+F9 to insert the field delimiters. Either way,
with the field codes displayed, you would need to create something that
looks like the following

{ IF { MERGEFIELD Report 1 } = 1 ". Report 1" }

Note, the . in the above is not a bullet as inserted by the use of bullets
and numbering, but is a symbol, inserted by holding down the Alt key and
typing 0149 on the numeric keypad.

When you have your field constructions set up, use Alt+F9 to toggle of the
display of the field codes.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I don't think this will be easy to do in the "If Then Else" dialog box but
you should be able to do it by editing the fields directly in the document.
This is more difficult to describe for Mac Word compared to Windows Word,
simply because Mac OS X may have grabbed the keystrokes that Word normally
sets up to work with fields, so I suggest you have a look at Daiya
Mitchell's article at

http://word.mvps.org/mac/FieldsInMacWord.html

before going any further.

What you need is something like this:

{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD "Report 1" }" = "1" "
<bullet character><tab character>Report1" "" }{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD "Report
2" }" = "1" "
<bullet character><tab character>Report2" "" }{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD "Report
3" }" = "1" "
<bullet character><tab character>Report3" "" }{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD "Report
4" }" = "1" "
<bullet character><tab character>Report4" "" }

Where
a. each pair of {} needs to tbe the special field braces that you can
insert using the "Type field braces" keyboard shortcut - here, Command-F9
works OK
b. "Report 1", "Report 2", "Report 3" and "Report 4" need to be the field
names in your data source. If there are no spaces in the field names, you do
not need the quotes around the names.
c. <bullet character> is a suitable bullet character, for example one of
the ones in the Wingdings2 font
d. <tab character> is just a normal tab (i.e. you can enter it on the
keyboard)
e. you need to have an ordinary new paragraph character at the end of each
line, i.e. after "1" "
I have tried to show that here, but you may not see it correctly in your
newsreader. But the idea is that if the mergefield is 1, you insert a new
paragraph followed by the bullet, a tab, then "Report 1"

You may need an additional tab before <bullet character>

This assumes that you really just want the short text "Report 1" after each
bullet. If you actually want to insert more at that point, this approach
will not be enough.

Clearly, the layout is rather restricted using this method, but the problem
is that if you try to format these lines with paragraph formatting that
inserts a bullet, you get "interference" because you have a paragraph style
inside the IF and another one at the end of the paragraph containing the IF.
It isn't very easy to get that to work reliably, so the above approach
assumes that the paragraph styles inside and outside the IF are the same.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Harimau]

I see. Thanks guys, that really helped! It works perfectly now.