Personalising a standard report

[Travers]

I want to personalise a series of standard reports by setting fields atthe
beginning of the report for NAME and GENDER and then using these, like a
'find and replace' to insert the appropriate name and personal pronoun (he,
she, him, her) in the text. I will only be producing one report at a time so
I don't know if mailmerge is what I want.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Whatever you do, you probably need to have a good look at Word fields in
Word Help.

You probably need to use mailmerge if you are producing a /lot/ of these
things and they are very standard. You would need to enter your NAME and
GENDER info etc. in a spearate data source (which can also be a Word
document) and typically you use { MERGEFIELD } fields to insert the data
into the document.

If you are just occasionally producing a report and need to enter the
name/gender information there and then, there are a few approaches you can
use, e.g.
a. insert ASK and/or FILLIN fields in your document to prompt for the data.
FILLIN fields insert the data once only where the FILLIN field is; to re-use
the data entered in an ASK field, use REF fields.
b. use VBA and a VBA Userform to prompt for the data, and VBA code to
insert it
c. create custom properties (see File|Properties) and use { DOCPROPERTY }
fields to insert the data. Then, for each report, you update the values in
the standard Custom Properties dialog box, then select your document text
and press F9 to update all the fields.

Whichever approach you choose, you can use { IF } fields to choose which of
two words/phrases to use, e.g. you might need a lot of fields like

{ IF { REF gender } = "M" "he" "she" }

(or

{ IF { MERGEFIELD gender } = "M" "he" "she" }

if you are doing a merge or

{ IF { DOCPROPERTY gender } = "M" "he" "she" }

if you are using approach (c)

)

Peter Jamieson