extra line in address when Contacts merge with letter

[Cathy]

When I merge Contacts into a letter in Word, sometimes there is a blank line
inserted between the street address and the city,state. I have tried the
delete/shift enter trick that deletes extra lines in signatures to no avail.
The extra line appears frequently in 4 lines addresses. When I edit
recipients, I can see that there are unprintable characters represented as
two small boxes, but I cannot find a way to delete them. Any ideas?

 

[Karl Timmermans]

How did these contacts originally get created (i.e. where did the address
info come from - the Outlook UI or via an import)?
Where are you trying to delete/shift trick? (in the merged document or in
Outlook itself?)

From what you're describing sounds like that is an extraneous blank line
followed by <CR><LF> characters (or either one of those) in the address
field within the contact record itself and it's the last line in the street
address that needs to be deleted if that's the case. If this supposition is
correct - you will need to specically check to see if the last line in the
problem addresses are empty (move your cursor to the last point in the
address which should be after that last visible character under normal
conditions). Just looking at the address visually won't tell you anything
(will just look normal since the last line is blank) and trying to delete it
in a merged document won't help since that's the not the "source" of the
information which in this case is a single field.

Karl

__________________________________________
Karl Timmermans - The Claxton Group
ContactGenie - Importer 1.3 / DataPorter 2.0
"Power contact importers for MS Outlook '2000/2003"
http://www.contactgenie.com

 

[Cathy]

These contacts may be from user input to Outlook or from an import from
Groupwise, the user does not remember. To rule out the import as a potential
problem source, I created a new contact in Outlook with the same address and
had the same problem with the merge.
I am making all changes in Outlook and restarting the merge process in
Outlook each time I test.
The addresses with problems all have a street address and a PO Box in
addition to the city,state, zip. In the merge in Word, I am selecting
address block and taking the default. If I select More Items and inset the
address field by field, I still get the blank line. If I put Address 1,
Address 2, City, State, Postal Code all on one line, it fixes these
addresses, but messes up the others.

 

[Karl Timmermans]

Without trying this out - the first thing that sticks out is that the PO Box
field is a separate and distinct field from StreetAddress which would
explain the extraneous line if the PO Box field is empty (you didn't mention
PO Box in the original message). In fact - PO Box is not part of the
standard "Address Block" as you'll see via the standard Import/Export wizard
(PO Box fields are listed separately from the Bus/Home/Other Address
blocks). The StreetAddress is generally a multi-line field in its own right.
In this case, suspect that you'd have to put in some conditional statements
for PO Box (been a while since I've played with mail merge so will leave
that part up to someone else more proficient with that aspect of it).

One could ask why PO Box is not part of an Address set (aside from it not
being used in the majority of cases) but regardless - that's the way it
works.

Karl

__________________________________________
Karl Timmermans - The Claxton Group
ContactGenie - Importer 1.3 / DataPorter 2.0
"Power contact importers for MS Outlook '2000/2003"
http://www.contactgenie.com