Mail Merge help needed....desperately

[MS CRM]

Dear Word experts,

How are you? Normally I spent time in the special Microsoft CRM
(Customer Relationship Management) newsgroup, but the answer to my
question can not be answered...yet. That's when I found this group.

Our problem is the following. We are using the Microsoft CRM software
to manage customer relationships. This piece of software should
'naturally' tie into other MS applications such as Word and Excel.
However....we are facing a big issue when mail merging to Word. The
situation is as follows:

MS CRM allows you to create a quote on which you can put a number of
products (line items). The structure would look something like this:

Product Pieces Price Total Price
Product X 2 50 100
Product Y 4 20 80
Etc
Etc

When the quote is finished, you can start a process which brings all
your products and other quote details(e.g customer address details) to
Word. Now the problem comes up. As an end-user, you seem to haver
little influence in how the items are put into the quote template. They
are just 'dumped' in randomly. We however, would like to group our
products by a unique identifier (in this case: software, hardware and
instruction) and display them in their own little section.

So, ideally:

Software

Product X 2 50 100

Hardware

Product Y 4 20 80

Etc.

I now I am asking a lot, but is it possible (perhaps by putting in 'IF'
statements) to design the template in such a way that it will not put
all products in one table, but group them according to their type and
calculate the subtotals accordingly.

This would really, really help us . Microsoft can not help us at this
time and we are getting lost.

Thanks!!!!!!!!

Michiel

 

[Anne Troy]

Michiel: I am not at all familiar with the CRM software, but I'm very
familiar with Word. A couple quickie little macros could help you
tremendous. Can you:
1) Send me one of these files
2) Send me a desired "after" of the same file
If it's as simple as I suspect, I could turn it around in an hour or less.
************
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com

 

[TerryC]

Michiel,

I suspect you are going to have a few problems sorting out your quotes. Your
data source (whatever MS CRM uses) looks like it is relational in structure
which is something mail merge does not handle natively. There are some work
arounds I have heard of - possibly a search for relational data merges might
turn up something.

Use of MS Query and some code behind your merge document (parameter passing
to MS Query etc) may provide a solution. This is not something I have ever
tried or done.

I would be inclined to use Access reporting to create your quotes. Access is
relational and I am sure would be able to connect to your CRM database.

Sorry to not be able to suggest a canned solution to your requirement.
Others in this group may well have other better suggestions / solutions.

HTH

Terry

 

[MS CRM]

Hi Terry/Anne,

Thanks a lot for your quick replies....I would really like to add my
..dot template and an example of the datasource to this thread, but it
does not seem to allow me.
We have been thinking of using a different tool to create the quotes,
but Word is what is used normally, plus there is a lot of standard text
that also needs to be included in the document. I do not think the
relational aspect will cause a problem, as the fields will only display
their contents in Word. However, since we do wat to group the
components and sum them up, some calculations needs to take place.

Although I do not want to be too straightforward, I can always supply
the .dot template to give a better idea of how the contents should look
like.

Where can I possibly send it to?


Thanks a lot!

Michiel


TerryC schreef:

 

[Anne Troy]

Michiel: You can join my forum and upload in a thread there:
www.officearticles.com/forum
************
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com