Word mail merge from Goldmine

[Mike at CommNet]

How can I suppress blank lines in a mail merge from Goldmine when fields on
one line are blank?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I don't have Goldmine here, and frankly I think Goldmine is popular and
idiosyncratic enough that I think their own support facilities ought to have
the answers to these questions, but as far as I know, when you "merge" from
Goldmine it isn't a standard Word merge and you have special DDE fields in
Word etc. Let us know if that isn't so. But if so,
a. does each DDE field bring across a different part of the address, or
does the whole address come across in one DDE field?
b. if each bit of address comes separately, does it make any difference if
you nest each field inside another field so that you see something like

{ IF { DDE goldmine topic field } = "" "" "
{ DDE goldmine topic field }" }

(use Alt-F9 to see all this {} stuff; use ctrl-F9 to insert new {} if you
need them)

Peter Jamieson

 

[Chris Curtin]

Goldmine has its own hosted newsgroups. go to gmnews.goldmine.com and select
public.goldmine6.general and ask your question there.

Chris

 

[Peter Jamieson]

BTW what chris means is that you need to access the NNTP news server
gmnews.goldmine.com, then find the newsgroup public.goldmine6.general on
that server. In other words, you need to look for

http://gmnews.goldmine.com probably won't get you anywhere,

nntp://gmnews.goldmine.com might, but I doubt it.

Good luck.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Chris Curtin]

I have used Goldmine for 8+ years and do a heavy amount of letter merging in
it. I am no expert, but one merge group you can use merges these data points
in the following layout:

contact name
company
address
city, state zip

If there is no company in the record then a blank line is not generated in
word 2000 or XP.

Chris

PS: The Goldmine news groups are very helpful and well attended.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

If Goldmine is doing a /merge/ then I certainly agree that blank line
removal would happen by default in Word 2000, XP.

Normally it should happen in Word 2003 as well, but there has been one
change since either Word 2000 or Word XP (I forget which), which is that
line removal does not occur if these fields are nested inside another field
suchas an IF or an INCLUDETEXT.

The other thing I'm aware of about Goldmine is that it has, or used to have,
a way to create letters that uses DDE fields rather than a Merge, in which
case things would probably be rather different. I leave the original
questioner to shed light on that if necessary!

Peter Jamieson