What are header record delimiters?

[Peter Jamieson]

In older versions of Word (2000 and earlier, don't know about Mac versions)
you could set up a data source for a MailMerge in two parts: a Header
Source, containing a list of the column names in the data source, and a
"Data Source", which would contain the actual data.

Typically a Header Source would be a .doc file or .txt file with a list of
column names separated by commas or tabs and terminated by a carriage
return/line feed or Word paragraph mark. The comma or tab is the "field
delimiter". The CR/LF is the "record delimiter". At one time things
generally seemed to work better if you duplicated the row of names in the
header (Word seemed to make a better job of guessing the delimiters).

All this was "deprecated" in Word 2002, possibly because most data source
these days come with headers of one sort or another. You can still use the
approach, but I do't think it works as well as it used to and I wouldn't use
it without a very good reason.

Or maybe you were asking about something else?

Peter Jamieson

 

[dante8]

Cheers Peter, most helpful. Unfortunately-and this is my own fault-I was in
such a rush that I didn't actually specify what the problem was.
What I want to do is print a series of numbered documents without having to
write the individual numbers on them (there are about 8,000...you see my
issue!)
Any cunning plans?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

There's a { MERGESEQ } field that you can put into your document that shows
the number of the current record (it gets this right even if you have
filtered the data nad made selections - i.e. if you merge two records, {
MERGESEQ } will be 1, then 2.

However, tha won't be useful if you use { NEXT } fields, { NEXTIF } fields
and so on. If you aren't using those, but you need a sequence such as 1000,
1001 etc. you can use a nested field such as

{ ={ MERGESEQ } + 999 }

Don't be surprised if this field shows a syntax error before you merge - it
should be OK when you merge, but test!

If you do a Letter merge to a new document you could also consider using the
{ SECTION } field, since each "copy" of the Mail Merge Main Document goes
into a new Word section. Not sure off the top off my head if that works when
you output to the printer.

Peter Jamieson