make mailmerge leave blanks when fields are empty

[Jenny hall]

Mailmerge kindly moves fields together when there are blanks (like in a short
address). Does anyone know how to stop this so the balnks are retained?

Also, does anyone know how to ensure that a field defined in Excel as text,
but containing mainly numbers, is treated by Word as text. At the moment, it
seems to treat this data as numeric, and represents any fields containing
non-numerics as 0. Only way round this at the moment is to ensure that the
first entry contains a non-numeric.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Mailmerge kindly moves fields together when there are blanks (like in
a short address). Does anyone know how to stop this so the balnks
are retained?

Use a conditional field eg

Also, does anyone know how to ensure that a field defined in Excel as
text, but containing mainly numbers, is treated by Word as text. At
the moment, it seems to treat this data as numeric, and represents
any fields containing non-numerics as 0. Only way round this at the
moment is to ensure that the first entry contains a non-numeric.

You could try:

From the Tools menu in Word, select Options and then go to the General tab
and check the box against the "Confirm conversions at open" item. (In Word
2007 it is Office Button > Word Options > Advanced > General > Confirm file
format conversion on open). Then when you attach the data source to the mail
merge main document, you will be given the option of using the DDE method of
connection which should read the data as you have it formatted in the table.

or use a formatting switch on the field -
http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Jenny hall]

Thanks for the reply - I notice a number of posts now about
including/suppressing lines, so it's clearly an issue. In the end, we
re-defined the template using a table, as this was easier. The user also
included a dummy record with alpha characters to resolve the second issue - I
had tried applying a text format to the field, but it still didn't work and
we are trying to keep it simple. However, I really appreciated your
suggestions.