including a different image in each letter being sent

[-keevill-]

I wish to do a mailing and as one of the fields to be included in the letter
is an image ( actually a customer logo ) . In each letter this image will
change according to the customer.
Can I do this as a mail merge or should I be looking at a database driven
application ?

 

[Graham Mayor]

See http://www.gmayor.com/mail_merge_graphics.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[-keevill-]

can I fine tune my question a tad?
I would like to scan a sheet of labels - each label different - and then
include individual images into the mail merge.
In other words a scanned sheet would contain perhaps 12 or so images and
each one of those images would be included into a letter relevant to the
client so that each client gets an individual image in his / her letter.
I am just looking for the simplest solution.

 

[Graham Mayor]

If you have a printed label sheet and OCR software you should be able to
extract the data from the labels to create a new database - but I understood
you already had the data file to create the labels, so where does the
scanning come into it?

If by scanning, you intend a means to obtain the graphics for your merge
then once you have done that, the process I linked earlier is the means to
get those images into your merge document. It doesn't get simpler than that.
There is no way to pick individual graphics from a scanned document and
include them in a merge. You will have to extract them first and associate
the file names with your data.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[-keevill-]

If you have a printed label sheet and OCR software you should be able to
extract the data from the labels to create a new database - but I
understood you already had the data file to create the labels, so where
does the scanning come into it?

If by scanning, you intend a means to obtain the graphics for your merge
then once you have done that, the process I linked earlier is the means to
get those images into your merge document. It doesn't get simpler than
that. There is no way to pick individual graphics from a scanned document
and include them in a merge. You will have to extract them first and
associate the file names with your data.

by way of explanation, I have a pile of customers who send me their logos.
Normally I have cut out their logos and pasted them onto an A4 sheet
individually so that each A4 sheet contains about 6 logos and then I scan
the sheet. I then use Photoshop to cut out and paste each logo onto each
letter. I am trying to make this a faster job. I was trying to avoid
scanning each logo individually if possible- rather scan 6 or so at one time
and somehow use mailmerge to pull the logo out of these sheets
automatically. It seems pretty clear that I must do each logo individually
but I was just trying to explore the possibility that there may be some
shortcut .
I do not need to use OCR for this job.

 

[Graham Mayor]

You could scan the sheet of six or so logos then use a graphics application
to selectively crop and save each logo with a new name.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Peter Jamieson]

Do you have a "full" version of Photoshop? If so, would their automation
tools let you do the cropping (I only have the Elements version here and the
automation features are very limited).

It might well be possible to automate the cutting up of your scanned
document into several pieces using Word, but
a. it could well depend on which version of Word you have and what image
formats you are able to save as from your scanner. You might be better off
asking in another Word group (perhaps a programing-oriented group) about
that
b. you might have other imaging applications that would make automating
this easier.