Merge Labels Printing Blank Lines

[David]

This question must have been answered a hundred times,
but I searched the postings and could not find an answer -
after having searched the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

In Word 2002, I am doing a mail merge to create labels
for mailing. The final product is printing out blank
lines when a particular field happens to be blank. There
must be an option somewhere that says, "Do not print
blank lines," but I am unable to find it. The
Labels "Wizard" seems to be the only way to merge and
print labels, and when it comes time to select "Print,"
the only options are to print "All" or a range of the
labels - nothing about suppressing blank lines.

I'd be grateful to be pointed to a way to suppress the
printing of blank lines.

David Kelley, Ph.D., CEO
Kenwood Psychological Services

 

[Graham Mayor]

Have a look at http://www.gmayor.com/mail_merge_labels_with_word_xp.htm
If you continue to have problems with blank lines, you may need to insert
conditional fields in order to insert the line feeds only when the data is
present e.g.

{Mergefield Name}{IF{Mergefield Company} <> "" "
{Mergefield Company"}{IF{Mergefield Address1} <> "" "
{Mergefield Address1"}etc

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[David]

Graham, thank you for your thoughts and your website.
Unfortunately, the website does not address the problem
of Word printing a blank line for an empty field. I am
hoping that someone has a simple answer to this question -
in the old WordPerfect, which I used before Word became
dominant, it was easily solved.
David Kelley, Ph.D., CEO
Kenwood Psychological Services

 

[David]

Thanks to those who have tried to help - I seem to have
figured out the answer to this problem myself. The answer
is not obvious, so let me spell it out. If you print from
within Word's merge "Wizard" by clicking on the Print
button in one of the final steps of the wizard, the
output will have a blank line whenever a field is blank.
However, if instead of clicking on the Print button, you
click instead on the button beneath it, which says
something like, "Edit Individual Records." This will
produce a complete merged document which can be saved
separately, and this document will NOT have blank lines
for empty fields. An alternate system, at this time or
earlier in the process, is to click in the Merge toolbar
near the top of the screen, on the button called "Merge
To New Document." This will similarly produce a merged
document that does not have a blank line when a field is
blank.

David Kelley, Ph.D., CEO
Kenwood Psychological Services

 

[Graham Mayor]

The web page is aimed at explaining the changes to mail merge introduced at
Word 2002 and provides the familiarity of the earlier setup.
The field construction in my reply will never produce a blank line.
However I see form your other reply that you hadn't completed the merge -
that helps

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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