Greeting Line

[Julie Love]

I can not get the Greeting Line to say "Dear Ms. Wall". It will say "Ms.
Wall" or "Dear Sir or Madam".

 

[Peter Jamieson]

1. It works OK here with a variety of titles, i.e. "Ms." behaves the same
as ""Mr." "Mrs." etc. That's with Word 2003 and data coming from Outlook
2003.

2. Which version of Word are you using? What is your data source?

3. If the data source is Outlook, are you iitiating the merge from Outlook,
or from Word?

4. If there is a field called "Title" in your data source, and you insert
that as an "INdividual" merge field, e.g. press F9 to give you a pair of
special "field braces", then type MERGEFIELD Title in between so you end up
with

{ MERGEFIELD Title }

what do you see when you preview the data and you are expecting "Ms."? What
do you see for "Mr." etc.?

4. if you press alt-F9 so you can see the "code" for your GREETINGLINE
field, what do you see?

e.g. here I have

{ GREETINGLINE \f "<<_BEFORE_ >><<_TITLE0_>><< _LAST0_>>
<<_AFTER_ ,>>" \l 2057 \e "Dear Sir or Madam," }

Peter Jamieson

 

[Julie Love]

Thank you Peter for responding. I am using Word 2003 for Mail Merge and the
same for my datasource typed in a table. The colum heading is titled "Name"
where Ms. Wall is the data. If I click the Greeting Line icon and ask to
match fields, it will still say "Dear Sir or Madam". I tried your f9
suggestion and got the same thing you did. I understand that it will default
to "Dear Sir or Madam," if the field is blank, but most fields are filled in.

The preview shows "Dear Mr. Randall,"

Sincerely

Julie Love

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Hello Julie,

In that case, you will probably get the most control if you avoid using the
"GREETINGLINE" field and use a combination of individual fields instead.

For example,

Dear { MERGEFIELD "Name" }

will probably do the trick, unless you have "Mr/Mrs" type records where the
Mr value is in one record and the Mrs is in another, or you need to deal
with situations in which a title or name is missing (in which case you need
to construct a more complicated field using "IF" fields and so on).

For GREETINGLINE to work, Word expects your data to have particular types of
data in particular fields, and/or for you to be able to "map" your field
names to their expectations. it may be possible for you to do that, but IMO
if it isn't realluy obvious how to do that it's better to avoid using the
ADDRESSBLOCK and GREETINGLINE fields altogether.

Peter Jamieson