In Word 97 there is no specialized facility to let you select individual
records in the data source.
If your records can be selected using a small number of very simple
selection criteria in the Mail Merge Helper's query options dialog box, you
could do it that way.
If not, you will need either to mark the records in the data source in some
way. e.g. if you have control over your Access database structure, you could
for example
a. add a column called "Merge" to your data source table, and set the value
of that column to "Y" for each record you want to merge and to something
else for all the other records, then use a filter (as described above) to
select the records you want. It would probably be useful to have an Update
query in Access to set all the values in the Merge column to "N" before you
begin.
b. or have a second table with the same structure, and copy the records you
need intoo , then use that as the data source.
If you go to all that effort you might also look at the possibility of doing
what you need in the Access Report Generator instead of Word.
If you can't work with Access in this way, you will need to export your data
source table then select the records elsewhere, either by marking the ones
you want or deleting the ones you do not. There are various possible ways
you can do that (sorry, can't remember what Access 97 can/cannot do), e.g.
a. use File |Export (I think), perhaps go into datasheet view if available
and copy/paste records.
b. or if you don't have too many columns (maximum 63) you could use a Word
Catalog merge to merge the table into a new Word document by creating a
single-row table in your MailMerge data source, with one column for each
field. merge to a new document. Manually insert a row of column headers.
Delete the records you don't want, or add a "Merge" column at the beginning
of the table and use it as described above.
Peter Jamieson
