Repeating data in Merge or conditional use of fields

[peter.thompson]

*** Newbie Alert *** (Felt I should warn you)

I have an application (off the shelf, not my own) that writes reports
to MS Word by outputting information into a Mail Merge Source and
having a DOT template pick up the fields for the report.

I have a test file that has 5 items and 4 fields within each item can
contain the name of an 'area' that I want to report on. eg Item 1 has
to be in 2 areas so 2 of the 4 fields contain the names of the area
and 2 are blank.

Ultimately I wanted to structure the report for each of the 'areas' so
that all the items that are linked to that area (viz the area appears
in 1 of the 4 fields) are listed together. If an item had more than
one area, the information would be repeated in the report.

I've got down to running a separate merge for each area (to be
combined in a manual process) and only want the information to be
displayed if the area name appears in 1 of the 4 fields.

I'm using the {IF {MERGEFIELD <Name>} = "Area1" "This is the
information"} but it's displaying information from all the items. I
tried reverse logic {IF {MERGEFIELD <Name>} <> "Area1" ""} but since
there are 4 fields to check its not working as I'd expect.

I'd like to be able to set up a variable so I can test each of the 4
fields and change the variable to True when I want the information
displayed.

Any ideas or hints would be great.

Thanks

(Version MS Word 2002 SP3)

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Sounds like you are probably trying to perform a "multiple items per
condition (=key field)" mailmerge which Word does not really have the
ability to do:

See the "Group Multiple items for a single condition" item on fellow MVP
Cindy Meister's website at

http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/mergfaq1.htm#DBPic


Or take a look at the following Knowledge Base Article

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

Or at:

http://cornell.veplan.net/article.aspx?&a=3815


--
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