Marking up data in Access to import in Word mail merge

[Brendan]

I have a field in my database that stores an outline of topics covered in a
course. The data is made up of headings and text.

In my Word document I've created a new style called "heading3". Is there
anyway to mark up the entries in the database field so that Word will know to
apply "heading3" to the headings?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Not really, if you mean that you want to be able to store /any/ style name
with the data. If you want to do that, you would probably have to use VBA
and Word's Mailmerge Events to apply the style specified in your data.

You could probably apply a limited number of predefined styles using an
INCLUDETEXT, e.g. you put the following in a file called
c:\include\myfield.doc:

bookmark the following line as "style1" and apply style "style1" to it:
{ MERGEFIELD myfield }
bookmark the following line as "style2" and apply style "style2" to it:
{ MERGEFIELD myfield }
bookmark the following line as "style3" and apply style "style3" to it:
{ MERGEFIELD myfield }
and so on...

then in your mail merge main document, use

{ INCLUDETEXT "c:\\include\\myfield.doc" "{ MERGEFIELD mystyle }" }

However, I haven't checked and you may find that the style in the main
document is used anyway.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Brendan]

I think I understand where this is going, but I'm not clear on how I would
need to mark-up the content of the database field to indicate where a header
begins and ends.

Can you provide further insight?

Thanks.
Brendan

 

[Peter Jamieson]

OK, I re-read your message and I don't think what I suggested is going to be
enough.

If you need to mark up parts of your text field, the task becomes much
harder. Either you would have to write VBA and use Word events to look for
markup in your text field and apply the appropriate formatting, or you would
probably have to markup your text in a way that allowed you to export the
content of your field to files (one for each record in your data source)
that you then included either with code or with an INCLUDETEXT. In that case
the markup would have to be in a format that Word already understood. It
might be HTML markup (but I don't know off the top of my head whether you
would be able to mark up using paragraph or character style names that Word
would recognise and apply) or RTF markup (even if that could be made to
work, it would render your field substantially less readable even than using
HTML markup).

Out of those three choices I think I'd probably opt for the "VBA and merge
events" one, if I really had to do it at all.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Brendan]

Hi Peter,

Thanks again. You've been a great help.

I recorded the following macro and tested running it on merged documents. It
works nicely. Do you know of a way to have it run automatically for each
merged document? Right now I'm having to run it manually (which is still a
step forward, at least).

Sub StyleReplace()
'
' StyleReplace Macro
' Macro recorded 5/3/2007 by Brendan
'
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.Style = ActiveDocument.Styles("Heading 3")
Selection.Find.Replacement.ParagraphFormat.Borders.Shadow = False
With Selection.Find
.Text = "\<h3\>(*)\</h3\>"
.Replacement.Text = "\1"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchWildcards = True
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Do you know of a way to have it run automatically for each

merged document? Right now I'm having to run it manually (which is still a
step forward, at least).

I would probably create a macro that perforrmed the merge /then/ did the
find/replace. e.g.

Sub MergeThenReplace()
Dim objMMMD As Word.Document 'Mail Merge Main Document

' After the merge, the new document becomes the active document
' So make a reference to the activeDocument in case we
' need to refer to it post-merge (although in this case, we don't)

Set objMMMD = ActiveDocument

With objMMMD.MailMerge
.Destination = wdSendToNewDocument
.SuppressBlankLines = True
With .DataSource
.FirstRecord = wdDefaultFirstRecord
.LastRecord = wdDefaultLastRecord
End With
.Execute Pause:=False
End With

With ActiveDocument.Content.Find
.ClearFormatting
.Replacement.ClearFormatting
.Replacement.Style = ActiveDocument.Styles("Heading 3")
.Replacement.ParagraphFormat.Borders.Shadow = False
.Text = "\<h3\>(*)\</h3\>"
.Replacement.Text = "\1"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchWildcards = True
.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End With

Set objMMMD = Nothing

End Sub

Peter Jamieson

 

[Brendan]

Hi Peter,

Thank you so much for your help!

Your script worked very well. Unfortunately my master document was full of
section breaks for formatting and I haven't found a way to fully adapt it, so
we'll still be doing some extra work. But again, thank you for your help.
Much appreciated.

Brendan