Mail Merge Question

Thanks for your idea...

before I put the time into it, quick questions....have you ever tried this before successfully and/or are you fairly confident this will solve the issue?

thanks again!

eager to try this but just thought I'd ask before trying....

Craig

Yes, I have used borderless tables with fixed height rows on many occasions to control layout.

Also, as the following code will refer to the first paragraph in the first cell of the table if the Table is the first thing in the body of the document:

ActiveDocument.Range.Paragraphs(1).Range

Therefore, unless you macro use some obscure coding, it should work.

However, if you are wanting to split the merged document into individual files, you may want to consider using the Merge to Individual Docs facility on the MergeTools – 20130627 Add-in that I created that you can download from the following page of my Windows Live SkyDrive:

https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=5aedcb43615e886b#!/?cid=5AEDCB43615E886B!cid=5AEDCB43615E886B&id=5AEDCB43615E886B%21566

Save the file in the Word Startup folder.  In Windows XP the default location for that folder is

C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP

In Windows Vista and Windows 7, it is

C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP

When you have done that, the tab shown below will be added to the Ribbon:

One thing to note is that the field names in your data source must contain only alphanumeric characters (No @,#,$,%,&,(,), etc) and the field names must not start with a numeric character (0-9).

Thanks so much!!!..i'm sure this will be very helpful..

eager to try this soon!

Craig

It worked great but now I have another problem

if the address doesn’t use all 6 lines, there will be awkward spaces:

Name

Address 1

City, State ZIP

Under the old method without a table, if this 6 address fields were not in a table, the address with only 3 lines would appear as (which looks good):

Name

Address 1

City, State ZIP

So, is there a way to make the 3 line address appear like it used to still  have the rest of the document always start at the same point?

 Thank you for any insight, help on this!

Craig

Use a one row table with all of the mergefields in the one cell.

You'd need to do rather more than that. Even with the fields in one cell, you risk having blank lines in that cell.

Suppose, for example, you have the following fields:

«Title» «FirstName» «LastName»
«CompanyName»
«Address1»
«Address2»
«City», «State» «Zip»

and any of «FirstName», «CompanyName», «Address1» and/or «Address2» could be empty. To handle that, you can use the \b and/or \f switch to conditionally insert the required space & line/paragraph breaks.

Here's how to do it using just the \f switch:

First, delete the space after «FirstName» and delete the paragraph/line breaks after each of «CompanyName», «Address1» and «Address2».

Next, select all the fields and press Shift-F9 to expose the field codes. You should (ignoring any line-wrapping imposed by this site) see:

{Mergefield Title} {Mergefield FirstName }{Mergefield LastName}
{Mergefield CompanyName}{Mergefield Address1}{Mergefield Address2}{Mergefield City}, {Mergefield State} {Mergefield Zip}

Now, edit the fields so you end up with:

{Mergefield Title} {Mergefield FirstName \f " "}{Mergefield LastName}
{Mergefield CompanyName \f "¶
"}{Mergefield Address1 \f "¶
"}{Mergefield Address2 \f "¶
"}{Mergefield City}, {Mergefield State} {Mergefield Zip}

where the ¶ symbols are real paragraph/line breaks.

Finally,  select all the fields and press F9 to update the fields. Your mailmerge is now ready to run.

Name

Address 1

City, State ZIP

and what he wanted was to force the text in the body of the document to start at the same place regardless of the number of lines in the address.

My suggestion was to use a borderless table with a fixed row height, intending that it just be a one row table.  However, it appears that Craig may have had a row for each of the address lines, which resulted in the spaces between Name, Address1 and City, State Zip.

Yes, the one row solution worked with a fixed height on the row  thanks so much!

Craig