merge multiple records for multiple clients?

[jewell]

--
jewell

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

You don't give us much to go on. That is the purpose of the white space.
But it is likely that you are trying to perform a "multiple items per
condition (=key
field)" mailmerge which, "out of the box", Word does not really have the
ability to do:

See the "Group Multiple items for a single condition" item on fellow MVP
Cindy Meister's website at
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/mergfaq1.htm#DBPic


Or take a look at the following Knowledge Base Article

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;211303

or at:

http://cornell.veplan.net/article.aspx?&a=3815


--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[jewell]

Sorry about the blank space. Not sure what happened but let me fill in the
blanks.

I have an exported file from another program. I've sorted the spreadsheet
by the client ID#. There are up to 4 records per client which I need to
merge into a label document. It runs fine except when a client only has 2
records it will merges the next 2 records for the next client. I need to
know if there's a rule I can add that will check if the clientID# doesn't
match it moves onto the next label. There are multiple data sources I need
to do this with and some as large as 15,000 data records. Here's an example
of current template.

{MERGEFIELD "clientID#"}{MERGEFIELD store location}{MERGEFIELD lastname},
{MERGEFIELD firstname}
{MERGEFIELD contactseq} {MERGEFIELD contactlastname}{MERGEFIELD
contactfirstname}
{NEXTIF{{MERGEFIELD "clientID#AND
contactseq}="clientID#\*MERFEFORMAT}{NEXTIF{{MERGEFIELD "clientID#AND
contactseq}="clientID#\*MERFEFORMAT}{NEXTIF{{MERGEFIELD "clientID#AND
contactseq}="clientID#\*MERFEFORMAT}

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Did you see my response to your similar post in the word docmanagement
group?

Is that a viable approach for you?

 

[jewell]

Thanks for responding so quickly. I did not see the similar posting you're
talking about. Where do I find it?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Perhaps it was a different jewell who posted a similar question to the
microsoft.public.word.docmanagement group on 3rd July. Part one of my
response explained why you can't use SKIPIF in this situation, and part 2
was as follows:

What you really need to make things work in this situation is a data source
that has exactly the same number of rows for every label. Easier said than
done, of course. However, one way you can create such a source is to do a
Directory (Catalog) merge to a new document, adding in rows where necessary.
Then you use that document as the data source for your label merge.

As a very simple example, suppose you have two columns of comma-delimited
data like this:

number,text
1,text1
2,text2
2,text3
3,text4
3,text5
3,text6
4,text6
4,text8
4,text9
4,text10
5,text11

and for the purposes of your merge you need 4 rows for each number, i.e.
this:

number,text
1,text1
,
,
,
2,text2
2,text3
,
,
3,text4
3,text5
3,text6
,
4,text6
4,text8
4,text9
4,text10
5,text11
,
,
,


Then you can create a Directory mail merge main document like this:

{ IF { MERGESEQ } = 1 "{ SET x -1 }{ SET count 4 }number,text
" }{ IF { MERGEFIELD number } = { x }
"{ SET count { ={ count }+1 }"
"{ IF { count } < 4 ",
" }{ IF { count } < 3 ",
" }{ IF { count } < 2 ",
" }{ SET count 1 }" }{ MERGEFIELD number },{ MERGEFIELD text }{ SET x {
MERGEFIELD number } }

Make sure there is a paragraph mark after { SET count 4 }number,text and at
the end of the following lines

"{ IF { count } < 4 ",
" }{ IF { count } < 3 ",
" }{ IF { count } < 2 ",

Also, each pair of { } must be the special field code braces that you can
insert using ctrl-F9.

Merge that to a new document and use that as the daa source for your label
merge.

If your data contains delimiter characters such as ",", """ (i.e.
double-quote) and <enter> then this will not quite be enough. You can deal
with "," by changing all the commas in the above example to tab characters.
As long as you have 63 columns of data or fewer, you can deal with
double-quote characters in your data source in a couple of ways, but the
easiest is probably
a. select the output created by the above merge
b. use Word's convert text to table function to convert the entire output
into a table

If you have <enter> in your records maybe we can discuss that...