How can I set up merge to only select certain records to include?

[pmsimp]

We have an employee roster with about 600 personnel listed, all from 6
different offices. We have a hard time keeping a printed phone directory
current, so I am trying to create a mail merge that we can use to generate a
phone directory. Each office needs to be on its own page (Georgia,
Tennessee, etc.). Also, for each office some departmental employees will be
listed under their department heading (Accounting, Marketing, etc.).

I thought I would try the "skipif", field. I'm thinking this will let me
tell it to only insert records that are in the "Atlanta" office.

Any thoughts on a way to do this? (Also, I could use an example of a skipif
field)

Thanks!

 

[Doug Robbins]

The easiest way to do it would be to use Microsoft Access with fields in the
table for office and department and then to use a report with subgroups.

To have any chance of doing it in Word with Mailmerge, you are also going to
need the additional fields to hold the office and department for each
employee, but it does really become a multiple items per condition type
mailmerge.
Word does not really have the ability to perform a "multiple items per
condition (=key field)" mailmerge.

See the "Multiple items per condition" item under the "Special merges"
section of fellow MVP Cindy Meister's website at

http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/MergFram.htm

Or take a look at the following Knowledge Base Article

How to Work Around Duplicate Names in Mail Merge Data

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;302665



Or, if you create a Catalog (on in Word XP and later, it's called Directory)
type mailmerge main document with the mergefields in the cells of a one row
table in the mailmerge main document with the keyfield in the first cell in
the row and then execute that merge to a new document and then run the
following macro, it will create separate tables with the records for each
key field in them. With a bit of further development, you may be able to
get it to do what you want.

' Macro to create multiple items per condition in separate tables from a
directory type mailmerge

Dim source As Document, target As Document, scat As Range, tcat As Range
Dim data As Range, stab As Table, ttab As Table
Dim i As Long, j As Long, k As Long, n As Long
Set source = ActiveDocument
Set target = Documents.Add
Set stab = source.Tables(1)
k = stab.Columns.Count
Set ttab = target.Tables.Add(Range:=Selection.Range, numrows:=1,
numcolumns:=k - 1)
Set scat = stab.Cell(1, 1).Range
scat.End = scat.End - 1
ttab.Cell(1, 1).Range = scat
j = ttab.Rows.Count
For i = 1 To stab.Rows.Count
Set tcat = ttab.Cell(j, 1).Range
tcat.End = tcat.End - 1
Set scat = stab.Cell(i, 1).Range
scat.End = scat.End - 1
If scat <> tcat Then
ttab.Rows.Add
j = ttab.Rows.Count
ttab.Cell(j, 1).Range = scat
ttab.Cell(j, 1).Range.Paragraphs(1).PageBreakBefore = True
ttab.Rows.Add
ttab.Cell(j + 1, 1).Range.Paragraphs(1).PageBreakBefore = False
For n = 2 To k
Set data = stab.Cell(i, n).Range
data.End = data.End - 1
ttab.Cell(ttab.Rows.Count, n - 1).Range = data
Next n
Else
ttab.Rows.Add
For n = 2 To k
Set data = stab.Cell(i, n).Range
data.End = data.End - 1
ttab.Cell(ttab.Rows.Count, n - 1).Range = data
Next n
End If
Next i


--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP