Mergeing a doc bumps the content causing overlap to next page

[mitchell]

I have several hundred mail merge templates that I use... recently we've
noticed that after performing the mail merge, the content on the page gets
bumpped down a few lines Leaveing a greater margin at the top of the page
then originally designed. working within the tight margins, the content that
would be at the end of the page is now bummped to a second page... When I
edit the template, with the merge field filled in, this does not happen, the
form is as it was intended, It's only when I merge the dot with my data
source that this anomaly occurs... WHY WHY WHY... How do I get it to stop
doing this...

Frustrated

Mitchell

Please reply to the group and or to my email (e-mail address removed)

 

[Anne Troy]

This usually occurs when you have merge field DATA that exceeds the size of
the merge field. For instance, your merge field might be a 11 characters
long for {LAST NAME}, but when you go trying to put Johnson-DiStefano in
there, it bumps the text down a line. You need to preview a LOT of your
records to find the longest ones and, if you need to fit to a page, use
THOSE as your "model", not your merge fields. This is a fairly common thing
to goof on. I do it all the time.
************
Hope it helps!
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com

 

[mitchell]

Thanks Anne... I appreciate your time... However, the problem I'm
experiencing is somewhat different... When the page merges. the top of the
first page, bumps down about 1 inch... And all consecutive pages follow
suite. The template I'm actually refering to is a 6 page document... the
first 4 pages contain tables with some merge fields. each of these 4 pages
have plenty of margin at the bottom, and they are not wrapping to the next
page... It's really page 5/6... where the legal ease of the 6 page agreement
really hogs up the pages. Before merging (while editing,building) the
template I have a 1 inch margin at the bottom of page 6 and a .5 inch on page
5... When Page 5's header gets bumped. page 6 bumps 3 lines to page 7...
Their are no merge fields on page 5/6... When I say bumps the content. it's
as though the Top margin of all pages reverts back to some predefined
formatting... even though I've modified my normal.dot with .5 on all 4 sides.
Others may not have this same setting for their normal.dot... Interesting
fact... It doesn't alway bump on mine, but always on others... but I would be
surprised if the normal.dot would cause this problem... as you can tell...
I'm babbling now... frustration will do that to you...lol

HELP

 

[Anne Troy]

Once a document has been created new, normal.dot has nothing to do with its
margins. Changing normal.dot's margins only affects margins on documents
created from it AFTER the change. Make sure that the document wasn't created
using paragraph returns to get to the next page. If they were, these could
be being bumped down to the top of the next page.
http://www.officearticles.com/word/show-hide_button_in_microsoft_word.htm

************
Hope it helps!
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com