Hello all;
As you may have noticed, I'm new here.
By way of introduction, I live in New Zealand, and have enjoyed the challenge of playing around with Excel for years, particularly coming up with solutions for tricky problems.
My current one has got me stuck, however: which led me to search the internet where I came across this forum. So, here goes:
I have a spreadsheet that I've created to build a data source. This data is currently being fed into Word as a mail merge to fill in the blanks in a one page form.
This works well, but is a little fiddly: every time I create a new set of data, I have to save the Excel file as a distinct filename, then point the Word mail merge to that file. Not too difficult, but this spreadsheet is ultimately not for me to use: I'd like to keep it a bit more 'user friendly' by removing the need to switch programs halfway through the process.
At any given time, there will be a maximum of 30 records in this database. So, I came up with the idea of replicating the form 30 times in Excel, stacked up on each other vertically on a sheet, with references linked to my data in the appropriate places. Each individual form would take up about 35 rows.
My question is this: let's say I only have 10 records in the database: how can I automatically alter the print area to exclude the last 20 pages, given that they will contain either links that will be producing a 0 value, or a text item?
Alternatively: is there a way to do a mail merge type operation within Excel?
In hindsight, perhaps Access would have been a better solution for this problem, but there were a couple of reasons I chose not to use it.
I look forward to hearing what people have to say: what a great place this is!
Regards,
Phil
As you may have noticed, I'm new here.
By way of introduction, I live in New Zealand, and have enjoyed the challenge of playing around with Excel for years, particularly coming up with solutions for tricky problems.
My current one has got me stuck, however: which led me to search the internet where I came across this forum. So, here goes:
I have a spreadsheet that I've created to build a data source. This data is currently being fed into Word as a mail merge to fill in the blanks in a one page form.
This works well, but is a little fiddly: every time I create a new set of data, I have to save the Excel file as a distinct filename, then point the Word mail merge to that file. Not too difficult, but this spreadsheet is ultimately not for me to use: I'd like to keep it a bit more 'user friendly' by removing the need to switch programs halfway through the process.
At any given time, there will be a maximum of 30 records in this database. So, I came up with the idea of replicating the form 30 times in Excel, stacked up on each other vertically on a sheet, with references linked to my data in the appropriate places. Each individual form would take up about 35 rows.
My question is this: let's say I only have 10 records in the database: how can I automatically alter the print area to exclude the last 20 pages, given that they will contain either links that will be producing a 0 value, or a text item?
Alternatively: is there a way to do a mail merge type operation within Excel?
In hindsight, perhaps Access would have been a better solution for this problem, but there were a couple of reasons I chose not to use it.
I look forward to hearing what people have to say: what a great place this is!
Regards,
Phil
