Mail Merge question in Word 2002

[Cheryl]

Hi, I'm trying to do a mail merge label so that all members of a specific
group get a label with their name on it, along with the names of the other
members of the group below it. Something like this:

Don H.

Mary K. Jane D.
Peter M. Kelly B.

The next label would be:

Mary K.

Don H. Jane D.
Peter M. Kelly B.

There will be about 200 people total, divided up into 30 groups. I've tried
sorting the database different ways, but I can't seem to get it right. Any
help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Which version of Word, where is your data stored, and how is it structured?

e.g. is your data source a table in a Word file, or what?

Do you have one row for each individual? How are you indicating to which
group each person belongs - do you have something like

Group,Person
Group1,Don H.
Group1,Mary K.

etc., or what?

Peter Jamieson

 

[Cheryl]

I'm using Word 2002 and may data is stored as a .mdb data base file. My
fields are First Name, Last Name and Group. I originally had another field
named "Position" which was the position within the Group. I was trying to
sort by Group and Position to rotate the names to the top center position in
the label. I couldn't get that to work.

Thanks, Cheryl

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Yes, I donn't think it's a particularly simple problem to solve, partly
because Word doesn't do "one to many" solutions out of the box and I don't
think just sorting your records into a particular sequence is going to be
enough.

There may be a simpler way to do this, but I would aim to create a new data
source that had columns

topname, listofnames

This would have one record for each participant, and a list of names
(probably separated by spaces) for all the other participants in their
group, e.g.

topname, listofnames
Don H., Mary K. Jane D. Peter M. Kelly B.
Mary K.,Don H. Jane D. Peter M. Kelly B.
and so on

Then you would use that as the data source for your label merge, simply
putting { MERGEFIELD topname } (i.e. <<topname>>) at the top of each label
and <<listofnames>> below. There might be a word wrapping problem but let's
ignore that for now.

The question is how to create that list, and that really depends on what you
can use. It's actually not very difficult using Access, but...are you using
Access, and can you use it to create new tables and queries (preferably
using SQL) ? Or are you using Word and the facilities for data entry built
into MailMerge?

Peter Jamieson