Merging Data into Differently-Sized Tables

[Mike]

Greetings:

I am a Mac OS X user attempting to merge FileMaker 8 data into Word
2004 for Mac.

What I would like to accomplish is to merge records into Word on
separate pages with embedded tables for each page. The tables will
include names and pertinent information that belong to each record. For
example: the names and phone numbers for a number of students in a set
of classrooms. Since each classroom has different amounts of students,
the tables would be of different size.

I will set up my imported data in such a way that the table data (e.g.
the student info) is stored in the last fields of each record. Once
Word discovers a field of data is blank, it will proceed to the next
record. During the mail merge process, I would like Word to generate
the appropriately sized tables based on how many fields contain data.
Is there an easy way I can use field codes or something comparable to
generate the tables? I want to keep this as simple as possible, given I
have no scripting experience.

Many thanks in advance for any assistance with this problem-

Mike Hegedus

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Word isn't designed to do this, and on the WIndows platform we usually say
"if possible, use the Access report generator instead", so I suppose the
equivalent is "use the Filemaker report generator insted" but
a. I don't have Filemaker on either platform, so do not know what it might
be capable of
b. you may already have rejected that option.

In principle, either of the following approaches might work:

http://www.knowhow.com/Guides/CompoundMerges/CompoundMerge.htm

and/or

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

The first one is along the lines of what you want, but you will only be able
to get it to work on Mac if Mac Word lets you issue a Filemaker query in a
{ DATABASE } field and agin, I do not know if it can do that. My guess is
that Word 2004 cannot because it would probably have to use ODBC to do it
and it does not appear to support it. The only alternative would be to
export some of the data to a data source that would allow you to select the
columns you need and specify a WHERE clause. perhaps a mulitistage approach
is workable, e.g. export to Excel or even Word, then merge. There are other
problems with the DATABASE field approach, e.g. that the resulting table
changes width, there's no way to specify right-aligned numbers, and so on.

An alternative is to perform the merge and insert markers that allow you to
prostprocess the output document using VBA or some other tool such as
Applescript.

Peter Jamieson