One letter first names in salutation

[Dale]

All,

I do a lot of mail merges using MS Word. I've dealt some with field codes
and macros but this situation stumps me. Is there a way/how would I deal
with one letter first names in a salutation. For instance, if I'm trying to
use the first name field of an individual from my data but the first and
last name looks like "D Jones" then the resulting salutation would be "Dear
D". Obviously this is not good. I would think the answer lies in proper
use of the If-Then-Else style Word Field. Therein lies my problem. How to
build an IF statement from looking at my data and deciding whether or not
the data is only one character long.

Can someone suggest how this may be done? I surmise possibly a Word
"compare" field might do but again, syntax gets in my way.

Help!

Regards
Dale

 

[Jezebel]

People's names (at least as they end up in databases) tend to be a pig's
breakfast at the best of times. Usually the best approach to this kind of
problem is to put the list into Excel (Excel can open an Access database);
add a column called salutation; then do whatever's necessary to populate
that column. Eg, use the length() function to find all rows where the first
name is short or missing. Then do your mailmerge from the Excel worksheet.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I posted an answer to the duplicate field code question in the mailmerge
fields group.

Peter Jamieson