Creating labels from a sectioned form letter

[cjaye]

I have designed a form letter showing 5 govt licenses.
Each is separated by 'Next Records' (from Insert Word
Field). The 5 licenses include text as well as Merge
Fields. My data source is an Excel spreadsheet. I'm
able to get the data onto the form ok throught the mail
merge function but what I can't figure out how to do is:

Print these licenses (from 1 to all 5 of them)on an Avery
business card label and allow the person printing them to
select which avery label on the sheet to print a record
to. Suppose they want to print to a page of labels where
the first 3 labels have been used and are gone and they
want to select the 4th label to start printing the
records. (Each license takes up two columns.)

Any expert advice would be greatly appreciated.
cjaye

 

[Cindy Meister -WordMVP-]

Hi Cjaye,

Essentially, the only way to do this is to send three (or
how ever many) empty records at the beginning of the merge.
Your case is complicated somewhat by also having text on
your "labels".

1) Since the data source is an Excel file, insert empty rows
at the top, just under the field names. If the users are
going to be doing filtering of some kind, you need to have
an entry in the field they'll be selecting on that ensures
the empty records will always be included in the selection.
And the users have to understand that they need to
insert/delete empty rows. (Of course, you could also have
VBA code that does this.)

2) In the main merge document, type a "double quote" before
the first and after the last character of each cell. Select
the entire content of each table cell that makes up the
"labels", then press Ctrl+F9 to put field code brackets
around the text. Note: don't try to select entire cells,
ONLY the text within each cell, from start " to end "!

Now construct an IF field that will query a field in Excel
that will have an entry for "real" records and no entry for
empty records. If it's an empty record, the content of a
cell will not print out. Roughly, it would look like this:

{ IF {Mergefield LastName}="" "" "All the cell content is
here, between double quotes" }

Print these licenses (from 1 to all 5 of them)on an Avery
business card label and allow the person printing them to
select which avery label on the sheet to print a record
to. Suppose they want to print to a page of labels where
the first 3 labels have been used and are gone and they
want to select the 4th label to start printing the
records. (Each license takes up two columns.)

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jan
24 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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