Complex mail merge question - repeat regions

[Brad Landers]

I have worked with Access databases involving relational
data for some time and have always wanted to merge my
data into Word documents. However, I have never been able
to determine a way to group like data or repeat sub-
regions in Word. Mail merge only seams suitable
for "flat" data structures.

Say I have an attorney against whom we have taken some
form of action involving more than one of his clients,
all of which I track in a database. I have an Attorney
table, and I have an Actions table, the two are related
via a foreign key lookup, but if I wanted to send a
single letter to the attorney with the multiple
clients/cases listed on the 'RE:' line I'd be out of luck
with Word. Normally I would pull together some sort of
Access report, but this means I have to pull copy from a
Word document, and formatting is less than favorable.
Believe it or not, I have (on occasion) resorted to using
ASP to output web pages with CSS page breaks. This is far
from optimal.

Is there a way to handle relational data in Word, or is
there a product out there that can allow me to accomplish
the same?

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP - DELETE UPPERCASE CHARACT]

Hi Brad,

I have done some pretty complicated letters such as this using an Access
Report. Word does not really do it, at least not be itself. for some other
ideas, see the "Multiple items per condition" item under the "Special
merges" section of fellow MVP CIndy Meister's website at

http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/MergFram.htm



--
Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.
Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the suggestion. The link you gave is a wealth
of information. I can't wait to start trying this out. I
guess I should pick up some books on Office Automation.
Maybe with the introduction of XML in Word we'll see some
better support for this in the future. InfoPath gives me
hope.