Opening and Printing multiple mail merge documents at once

[Griffo]

Hi there

We have several documents (constantly being added to for the next 3 months)
that are populated through a mail merge.

What I need to be able to do is open all the documents at once, select the
relevant record or records (some documents will only have one record printed,
other documents may have several documents printed), update them according to
my selection, and then print or PDF them (individually).

Is there an easy way to achieve this that anyone knows of?

Please let me know if I'm not clear in my explanation, as I'm having trouble
communicating the situation clearly I think!

Thanks
Griffo

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Depending upon the criteria for selecting the record (or records) to be
merged into the document, it may be possible to automate the process, but
you have not given enough information to tell if that would be possible.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Peter Jamieson]

What I need to be able to do is open all the documents at once, select the
relevant record or records

(some documents will only have one record printed,
other documents may have several documents printed)

It seems to me that you need to make two separate selections: one for the
documents that need multiple records, and one for the documents that need
only one record. Is that the case?

What is version of Word, your data source, and how much control do you have
over it? For example, if it is a spreadsheet, the simplest approach would
probably be
a. always start with a spreadsheet with the same name
b. have one or two columns in the spreadsheet where you make your
selections - you mark records to be merged as "Y" and other records as ""
c. ensure every mailmerge has that spreadsheet set up as its data source,
with filter settings to enable it to pick the reight records
d. have a Word VBA macro that opens each Mail Merge Main document in turn
and performs the merge (you'll need some 3rd party software to merge to
PDF). You'll also need to make the registry fix described in
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825765/en-us.

If you have to be able to use a different data source each time and you have
to be able to select records individually outside the data source, things
get rather more difficult. But perhaps we can get to that if you really need
it.