Inconsistent Formatting after Merge

[Richard Mugg]

Again this year I am attempting to use Excel as the data
source to generate IRS Form 1099Rs. The Forms come
preprinted ready for the laser. A Word 2002 document
provides the formatting and spacing to place the data on
the printed form.

The problem is that when mergefields contain no data (or,
perhaps when they DO contain data), the merged documents
are inconsistent. My simple minded analysis is stumped:
the word document contains carriage returns; what should
it matter if the mergefield just prior to that return
actually contains an "x" or a number?

The data placed on each document is generated by simple
IF THEN logic; I do not use INCLUDETEXT, which from my
reading appears to be a problem with Word 2002 and
suppression of blank lines.

Any ideas??

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Hi Richard,

My simple minded analysis is stumped:

My simple mind is also stumped - clearly something is going wrong, but can
you please spell out what it actually is? Are you losing complete lines? Is
the horizontal spacing/tabbing failing?

 

[Richard Mugg]

The problem is that lines are being displaced
horizontally down, depending on whether data is present
in a line above. For instance, on the form (there are
two identical forms per 8x11 sheet, one atop another),
there is a place to enter "State Tax Withheld." Its
field is at the very bottom of the form. If the first
set of data has no entry for that item (depending on the
particular individual's distribution of money, there may
or may not be state tax withheld), my form correctly
places the data for the second form on that page.
However, if the data for the second form has an entry
for "state tax withheld," then I find that the data on
the next generated document is displaced from the top,
etc.

There are about nine fields filled in on each form.
Three of these may or may not contain data from one form
to the next. When you combine all the different
combinations, the effect on spacing throughout the mail
merge is almost impossible to analyze --- to zero in on
what change is causing what effect.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

There are two main possibilities here:
a. Are these fields ever on a line by themselves? If so, when the fields
are empty the lines will be removed. In Word 2002 the option for changing
this behaviour is not available from the mail merge wizard or toolbar, so to
change the behaviour you probably need to use Tools|Customize to get the old
option back -

Tools|Customize|Commands, select category All Commands, locate
MailMergehelper out to a toolbar. Close the Customizeialog, then use the
Merge button in the Helper to check "Print blank lines when data fields are
empty".

Alternatively, you may be able to do something like add some blank space to
the line (so that there is something other than the empty field)

b. the merge is using NEXT/NEXTIF fields to process a variable number of
data records for each form, e.g. if there are multiple rows and sometimes a
person needs 0 and sometimes 4. If you followed some of the examples (e.g.
in the Microsoft Knowledge Base) on how to handle variable numbers of
records per "item", then you will need to adapt their examples because they
tend to assume that you only want the lines that have some data in them,
whereas you need a line end for each line which /might/ appear.