Customize form letter...

[Mike]

I'd like to customize form letters to match criteria related to the recipient
of a letter. The recipients of this form letter would like to have
information addressed that falls into about 7 different categories. So, I'd
like to be able to create a data base of information, for instance, 7 short
paragraphs that address those issues related to what the recipient is looking
for, and then merge this information into the main form letter. Can I do
this? Where do I learn? What do I need to know?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Can I do this?

Well, it depends on exactly what you need to do.

The simplest interpretation of your requirement as stated is that you have
seven paragraphs, each of which might or might not be included, one after
the other. So person A might have none of them, person B might have paras 3,
4, 5, and person C might have paras 1, 3, and 7.

If it's as simple as that, then a simple approach would be to have:
a. a data source with one row/record per recipient, with whatever info. you
need (name, surname etc.) plus 7 fields/columns, one for each paragraph.
Let's call those columns P1,P2,..,P7. Let's say you put a Y in a column to
indicate that the paragraph should be included, and a blank to say it should
not.

Then in your Mail merge main document you could have nested IF fields such
as:

{ IF { MERGEFIELD P1 } = "Y" "insert paragraph1 text and perhaps inline
graphics.
" ""
}{ IF { MERGEFIELD P2 } = "Y" "insert paragraph2 text and perhaps inline
graphics.
" ""
}

....and so on, where each pair of {} are the special field braces you can
insert using ctrl-F9

Your data source could be almost anything (a plain text file, a Word table,
an Access table etc.), but if you are using Word 2002 or later I suggest you
do not create it using the facility provided within the Mail Merge Wizard,
which can be a bit inflexible unless you have a very standard
name-and-address database.

Or you could probably do the whole thing using an Access report...

Peter Jamieson