INCLUDEPICTURE

[Kieran_Hannigan]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: Intel

I have tried, unsuccessfully to get IncludePicture to work.

I had it working fine on a windows machine but whatever I try, I cannot get it to work.

It has been discussed on the board previously - <a href="chet, "Include Picture - mail merge for word" #8, 8 Sep 2008 10:30 am </?13@@.59b56466/7>">chet, "Include Picture - mail merge for word" #8, 8 Sep 2008 10:30 am</a>

Previous discussion included the expert input from John McGhie, Jim Gordon & Chetan. Chetan had it working but I have not been able to master it - perhaps if you are out there Chetan you can get in touch. I followed those steps and it only says "Error! File name not specified".

Anyho, I have just spent two hours on it and I would really love to crack it so if anybody can help, that would be great.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

1. You nee a nested field like

{ INCLUDEPICTURE "{ MERGEFIELD picturepath }" }

where the pathname field contains the complete path - e.g. if

{ INCLUDEPICTURE "/users/me/Pictures/xyz.jpg" }

successfully inserts a picture, and your data source has column picturepath
with

/users/me/Pictures/xyz.jpg

then the above construction should work. If you just have a picture file
name "xyz.jpg" in field picturename then you would need

{ INCLUDEPICTURE "/users/me/Pictures/{ MERGEFIELD picturename }" }

Of the various things that can go wrong here, the following are IMO the most
likely:
a. your "field codes" are not actually field codes, ie. the "field braces"
{} have been typed. They must be the special field code braces. If you can't
work out how to enter them on Mac, insert any old field and strip out the
contents to get an empty pair of {}, then copy/paste or drag them into
position.
b. you have an additional space in the picture path (either in the data, or
like this...)

{ INCLUDEPICTURE " { MERGEFIELD picturepath }" }

IME Word tends to stuff such things in. Remove any of that.
c. you are merging to a new document, and the same picture appears
everywhere. This is because you /have to/ select the output document and
update all your field codes. As far as I know, nothing makes Word merge the
correct pictures in the first instance. However, if you toggle field code
display in the output document, you should see that the correct paths have
been inserted for each image.
d. you are merging to dirrect to the printer. In that case, AFAIK only one
thing works:
- You check Word->Preferences->Print->Update links (despite the fact that
this is a field, checking "Update fields" does not do the trick, although it
should not do any harm)
- you add a \d switch to your field code, and select the field and
re-execute it, e.g.
{ INCLUDEPICTURE "{ MERGEFIELD picturepath }" \d }
(This means that in thoery, Word does not retain the image data when you
save the document and has to go and get it from the disk file when you open
the document. This seems to force Word to get the correct picture data each
time it executes an INCLUDEPICTURE field)

That's all in Word 2008 - I haven't experimented on this particular front in
Word 2004.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were additional considerations but if so,
they are beyond my current abilities on Mac.

 

[Kieran_Hannigan]

Thank you, thank you and thank you again Peter. IT worked like a charm. I am not sure what was different this time, but the outcome was there. Thank you too to all the others who contributed back in September.

At last.....

Thank you.