Duplicate records based on spreadsheet data being merged?

[Digger]

I'm trying to make coupons for guests at a hotel using mail merge, with only
basic experience. There's one coupon that guests get a copy of for each
night of their stay. Basically, my excel sheet looks like this:

Name // Number of Nights // Coupon1 // Coupon2
SMITH // 2 // Y // Y

I've solved the "create one coupon for each guest whose "Coupon1 = Y"...
but I'm trying to find a way to tell Word that Mr. Smith should receive *two*
copies of Coupon2, and haven't found a way. Is there one? I'm guessing that
if there is, it involves bookmarks/word fields/ something else I have no
understanding of. Can someone point me in the right direction?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

What to do depends partly on what possible combinations of coupon there can
be, and partly on how you are laying out your coupons.

You can always consider creating the data source you really need. There are
various ways you could do that, but maybe that's a last resort.

If there are only a small number of combinations of coupon, you could
consider doing several separate merges, using the Edit Recipients to filter
the data source records you need for each merge. You would almost certainly
need to collect each person's coupons together by hand - probably not a good
approach.

If in addition you are not using a table to lay out your labels

If you are using a Letter merge and are not using table cells to define the
layout of your coupons, /and/ you know that there can only be up to a
certain number of coupons, you can do something like tthis.

Let's suppose you have some fields and text like this (you can use Alt-F9 to
look at the underlying fields):

Coupon for { MERGEFIELD Smith }

{ MERGEFIELD "field 2" }

More text...

Then create an IF field at the end of your existing fields and text (you can
use ctrl-F9 to insert each pair of the special {} then insert any text in
the usual way)

{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD Coupon2 }" = "Y" "" "" }

then copy all your existing text and paste it between the first "", so you
end up with a complete document like this:

Coupon for { MERGEFIELD Smith }

{ MERGEFIELD "field 2" }

More text...

{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD Coupon2 }" = "Y" "Coupon for { MERGEFIELD Smith }

{ MERGEFIELD "field 2" }

More text..." "" }

If neither of those helps, we need to know more about what possibilities you
have (more than two coupons etc. etc.)

Peter Jamieson