Just suggestions:
1. make a choice based on the requirements you foresee.
2. when you consider your requirements, think about
a. how much time and resource you have to make your choice and to
implement your solution, or an initial solution
b. how many addresses you are talking about. tens? hundreds? thousands?
millions?
c. how freqeuntlly will you be producing mailings?
d. who will be using and maintaining the data? just you?
e. what will use the data? just mail merge applicaitons? or will other
applications need the same data? Do you need to interface with other
software as well?
f. to what extent you need to be able to extract individual parts of an
address, either for insertion in your mail merge output, or for
sorting/selection. e.g., do you just need a complete name/address (the sort
you might print on an envelope, or as the recipient of a letter) or do you
need your data to populate your salutation "Dear...", influence your choice
of signoff (Yours...), allow selection by country/postcode/zip, and so on
g. do you need to cope with multi-addressee addresses (Dear Mr and Mrs
Smith) and multiple address types for the same addressee
(home/business/delivery/billing/other), and international addresses
h. security and legal requirements
Arguably,
- for the simplest possible merge applications with small numbers of
addresses, al you need is a Word document containing a table with one
column. In the first cell, put the column name, e.g. Address. In each cell
below that, put a complete address with each line separated by a paragraph
mark (i.e. don't put the entire address in a single paragraph) The main
disadvantage is that if you want to edit those addresses from within Word
MailMerge, Word does not let you expand the editing box vertically.
- if you need more structure than that, you should structure your data in a
way that makes it easy to maintain and use. For example, if you need to
split your data up into first name, last name, street address, city, state,
zip etc. then you (or your users) may eithe rhave to use the ADDRESSBLOCK
field (which is notoriously unreliable) or to insert Word fields that insert
each of those items, and deal with any cases where any of those pieces of
information is missing. That requires that they use potentially complex
sequences of IF fields. Easier perhaps to ensure that your users have the
field they need. There are various ways you can approach that using
Microsoft/Office and some programming.
- if you need large numbers of addresses or are doing lots of mailings,
consider the possibility that you need a purpose-built mailing product.
