One datasource - Multiple documents

[sfinkboner]

I have a merge that is one datasource, but has multiple types of letters that
need to be printed. Each letter is represented by an individual code (EX:
AA) Everytime my datasource includes letter_code AA, I want the text from
letter AA to print. I have about 50 different letter codes. Merge may not
be the best way to do this, and I'm open to suggestions on how to handle
this. I currently have the main letter set up as {IF {MERGEFIELD
LETTER_CODE} = "AA" "{INCLUDETEXT AA.DOC}" ""}.

Is there a better/easier way to do this?

I've also just upgraded from an old version of office (I believe it was
Office 2000) to Office 2003 and have to redo the main merge letter, so I'm
wondering if there is a better way to do this.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

The approach you use used to work fine as long as the letters were
sufficiently similar (same page layout, maybe the same headers/footers etc.)
and indeed is suggested in an article in Microsoft's Knowledgebase. It may
work fine after the upgrade to Word 2003, in which case I would not change
it. However, over time, there have been changes to INCLUDETEXT (some of them
for security reasons, and others for no apparent reason at all) and so I
would check your output very thoroughly in Word 2003.

Out of the box, Word 2003 does not offer a new improved way to do MailMerge
(indeed, many people think the old ways are better).

A few things to pay attention to:
a. By default, Word 2003 connects to data sources such as Excel using
OLEDB rather than DDE (or ODBC). That can sometimes cause problems, either
because you do not get the same records as before, or because items such as
dates and amounts may not be formatted as you expect. Graham Mayor has a
wealth of info. on his website about these issues - I would have a quick
look through his site at http://www.gmayor.com
b. if your letters rely on "suppress blank lines", e.g. to remove blank
lines in addresses, this will probably not work any more. It only works if
the fields are not included in other fields such as INCLUDETEXT or IF. If
you need to do that, you will probably have to redo the way you do all your
addresses (Graham has info. on this - all I would suggest is that you
redesign the way you do your address, if necessary, once, then copy it to
all your letters. I'm not sure if Graham mentions the new \b and \f switches
that can help in this area).
c. you may find that

{IF {MERGEFIELD LETTER_CODE} = "AA" "{INCLUDETEXT AA.DOC}" ""}.

causes problems and that

{ INCLUDETEXT "{MERGEFIELD LETTER_CODE}.DOC" }

works better, as long as every letter code corresponds to a document name.
You may also have to uncheck Word Tools|Options|General|Web
options|Files|Update links on save.

If you decide to redesign your letters, you will probably come across at
least two new Word fields - ADDRESSBLOCK and GREETINGLINE. They may work for
you, particularly if you are in the U.S., but I would test carefully before
moving away from using individual fields for those items.

If you find that your INCLUDETEXT approach does not work as well as you
need, in Word there's only one way you can really go and that's have one
separate merge for each document, setting the sort/filter options for each
document to pick up the relevant records from the data source. In that case,
you might find it useful to automate the running of those 50 merges using a
bit of VBA.

(Actually, Word 2003 does come with one other way you could do a merge and
that's to apply an XSL transform to your Word. Personally, I wouldn't go
there unless you are very technically-minded and love improbably difficult
challenges for their own sake )

Peter Jamieson

 

[jcl]

Is there a way to do this where, if a mergefield contains a certain word you
can use includetext or can it only be the equal to, not equal to, great than,
less than etc operators.

I know you can do this with a query but then it doesn't work for doing
multiple documents at once.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Is there a way to do this where, if a mergefield contains a certain word

you
can use includetext or can it only be the equal to, not equal to, great
than,
less than etc operators.

I don't think you'll be able to do that using Word's basic field language,
for two reasons:
a. there's no "contains" type operator in the Word "field" language, e.g.
you can't use

{ IF { MERGEFIELD abc } contains "summat" "do this" "do that" }

The best you can do is catch words at the beginning or end of the field (but
not both) using wildcards, e.g.

{ IF { MERGEFIELD abc } = "summat*" "do this" "do that" }
b. using a construct like

{ IF { MERGEFIELD xyz } = "something" "{ INCLUDETEXT blah }" "" }

tends to cause problems anyway, which is why { INCLUDETEXT "<some
expression>" } is preferable.

I know you can do this with a query but then it doesn't work for doing
multiple documents at once.

Assuming that you mean 'I can write a query that selects records where
fieldx contains "summat", then another one which contains "nobbut", and so
on' then that's true. But what if you can write a query (which you would
probably have to store in Access rather than issue from Word) which returns
information for each row in the underlying table that tells Word exactly
which document to merge? That may not be straightforward, but it may also be
feasible.

An alternative is to use a ( DATABASE ) field in Word to implement a
"contains" function in some way. I can make suggestions about how to do
that, but I have to say that if it can be done that way, I /think/ it should
be possible to construct an Access query to do it.

Peter Jamieson