Mail Merging Question

[Irwin109]

It's probably not possible, in which case I'll just make a new field but:

In my Access database I have a "Next Of Kin" section and I have it so if
there is more than one name you can enter it on a new line. Is there a way
when mail merged to Word to make this new line tabbed over E.G

Mr A One
Mr B Two

to become

Mr A One Mr B Two


Like I say it's probably not possible but I just thought I'd ask!

 

[John McGhie]

No, it's not possible.

The fundamental rule of Databases is "Never store more than ONE piece of
information in a field."

Now you know why they say that

And why so many items of junk mail arrive addressed to "Dear Mr or Mrs
Robert Hill" ‹ many large corporations have such a mess in their mailing
database that they have given up completely trying to clean it up.

Fortunately, you have the option of fixing yours now

In Access, you can write some nice tricky VBA to find these fields and split
them into a new column. Return the text of each cell that is not null and
parse it looking for the newline character. If you find it, use the right()
function to grab the text from there to the end and move it into the next
column.

Cheers

It's probably not possible, in which case I'll just make a new field but:

In my Access database I have a "Next Of Kin" section and I have it so if
there is more than one name you can enter it on a new line. Is there a way
when mail merged to Word to make this new line tabbed over E.G

Mr A One
Mr B Two

to become

Mr A One Mr B Two


Like I say it's probably not possible but I just thought I'd ask!

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[CyberTaz]

It sounds like you're using Office 2007 & have taken advantage of the new
field property to allow multiple entries in the field. You should be able to
extract either, but your best source will be I one of the Access groups. I'm
aware of the property, have used it, but never for mail merge. Try in the
Access forums you'll find here:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/FlyoutOverview.mspx

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

 

[Peter Jamieson]

FWIW from a MailMerge perspective, when using a multi-value field, you
see field content that consists either of the list of values separated
by ";" (or perhaps some other separator - I don't know where this
particular one is defined) or a list of the key values of the selected
rows in the lookup table, if the field has been set up to reference one.
There's a slight difference in layout if you connect via DDE rather than
OLE DB, but the content seems essentially the same. It would be
surprising if either Word or the OLE DB provider did anything especially
"mail-merge friendly" such as splitting out the list into separate
columns or duplicating rows (because these "multi-value lookup fields"
were introduced primarily to work with Sharepoint lists), and sure
enough, neither of them does.


Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk