Merge Tutorial

[MLRenner]

Can anyone suggest a good tutorial source for merging? I work in a probate
law office and need to find out how to set up court forms for estates where
names, addresses, dates of birth and death, and other info. can be merged
from an Excel database (not yet set up) into the forms. We have taken Word
beginning, intermediate and advanced classes but even the advanced course
just barely touched on merge and it seemed to be geared towards letters.

Thanks.

 

[Doug Robbins]

While Word can come up with the observation "You appear to be writing a
letter. Do you need some help" there is really no difference between a
letter and a form or any other document and the prinicipal use of mailmerge
is to make multiple replicas of the one document with certain details in
each one drawn form a data source - one document for each record in the data
source.

Your application sounds more like you want to create a number different
documents where the only common elements are the data from a single record
in a data source. That's not to say that mailmerge cannot be used to do
that, just that it is not what it is really designed to do.

See the articles "Creating a Mail Merge Data Source" at:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/CreateADataSource.htm

and "How to create a Mail Merge" at:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/CreateAMailMerge.htm


--
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Hope this helps,
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[lost in cincy]

I work in a law firm as well, although not probate, we do a lot of merge
pleadings. I don't know of any tutotial, but I can try to help if needed.

 

[MLRenner]

Thanks for your offer of help! I ordered a book on using Microsoft office in
the law firm and hopefully it will be helpful. I found an article on
Microsoft's website for Word 2000 on how to merge a single data source to
multiple letters using includetext which I thought would be helpful but is
confusing since I am using Word 2002. Does your office merge a single data
source into multiple documents?

 

[Charles Kenyon]

You can find a number of resources at
http://addbalance.com/word/wordwebresources.htm#mailmerge