Mail Merge in Word 2008 for Mac

[adriane101]

The source table in Excel contains some blank fields. e.g. some records have
2 address lines, some only one. Some addresses include a County, some don't.
In these cases the merged document contains blank lines in the address box.
Using the 'More' option in Section 3 of Mail Merge Manager does not help.

 

[CyberTaz]

The default behavior of Word's Mail Merge is to not include empty lines if
the fields on that line truly have no content. If the 'blank' lines are
occurring it's because there actually is some content on those lines ‹ even
if you can't see it. It could be punctuation or spaces inserted between
fields on the line. It could also be caused by the data from the Excel
file... I've seen similar situations where the supposedly empty cells had
been cleared of content by pressing the spacebar rather than the delete key.

It's hard to visualize the record source based on your limited description,
but if you can specify exactly what fields (columns) it has & what the
nature of the content in each field is perhaps there are other explanations.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[John McGhie]

I have just completed a large commercial mail-merge project, so allow me to
add some thoughts:

1) If your input data is dirty, you have an accident waiting to happen.

2) Clean your input data in Excel before trying to merge with it. Excel is
the place to do this: Word's selection abilities are often not sophisticated
enough.

3) Use Excel formulas to re-express your source data into a new worksheet
for mail-merging. That way as the original addresses get updated, Excel
will automatically put the data right in the merge source.

4) Separate all of the addresses into their individual components:
Honorific, First Name, Last Name, Suffix, Apartment Number, Level, Street
Number, Street Name, Street Type, Suburb, City, Post Code, Country,
Bar-code...

The more fine-grained the better. Separate out even the fields you will not
use for your mail merge. Do this right and you get to do it only once

5) Go through your master list and correct addresses that have more than
one kind of data in a field. For example: if the street number and street
name are combined, split them out. If the apartment number and house number
are combined, split them out.

The thing that breaks MOST mail merges is "conflated data". If you have
more than one kind of data in a field, your SELECT statements are guaranteed
to fail, usually ten minutes before your absolute deadline.

If you can persuade yourself to clean up that data set, you will have a long
and happy life with mail merge. If you can't quite manage to get yourself
to complete this job, your mail merges will always be unreliable.

Pop across the hallway to the Excel guys if you are unsure how to create
Excel formulas to do this kind of thing: Excel is unbelievably powerful at
data manipulation

Hope this helps

The source table in Excel contains some blank fields. e.g. some records have
2 address lines, some only one. Some addresses include a County, some don't.
In these cases the merged document contains blank lines in the address box.
Using the 'More' option in Section 3 of Mail Merge Manager does not help.

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]