Word Question

[SusanDalton]

I have 6 different Word files that generate letters from 1 Excel workbook. Currently, I am mail merging the letters one at a time and printing.
I have set up a column in Excel called letters and I input a value of 1 through 6 in the column. I filter against this column each time I print.

I am going through the same mail merge process 6 times to generate all of the letters.

My goal would be to save the six letters in one Word document and embed code at the beginning of each page. The code would tell Word which records belong with their respective letter.

Is it possible to streamline this process?

 

[SydneyGeek]

HI Susan, not sure but this part can probably be streamlined:

I filter against this column each time I print.

Do you go into Excel and filter, then run the merge? If so, I'm pretty sure you can do that filtering from Word. That is one less step.
The next option after that would be to create code in another, controller document. The code could --
Open each document in turn (the file paths could be hard-wired in code, or you could place them in the controller document or use a file picker to choose them; alternatively, place the files in a folder and process evrything in there).
Once each document opens, run the mail merge, then save and close. This could be coded too, so that each merge run was saved to a set location with a file name including a date stamp.

Would this be the sort of thing that you are looking for?

Denis

 

[Macropod]

Hi Susan,

You should be able to do this easily enough by wrapping each 'letter' in an IF field (created via Ctrl-F9), coded along the lines of:

{IF{MERGEFIELD Key}= # "Body of #th Letter"}

where 'Key' iis the name of the field you put the numbers 1-6 in and # is the 'key' value.

You'd run all these IF tests together one after the other, with no page breaks in between, thus:

{IF{MERGEFIELD Key}= 1 "Body of 1st Letter"}{IF{MERGEFIELD Key}= 2 "Body of 2nd Letter"}{IF{MERGEFIELD Key}= 3 "Body of 3rd Letter"}{IF{MERGEFIELD Key}= 4 "Body of 4th Letter"}{IF{MERGEFIELD Key}= 5 "Body of 5th Letter"}{IF{MERGEFIELD Key}= 6 "Body of 6th Letter"}

Do note that the field brace pairs (ie '{}') must be created via Ctrl-F9 - you can't simply type them or copy & paste from this post. And be careful with the spacing and to enclose the body of each letter in a pair of double quotes (plus you can't have any in the body of the text - though there are way around this if it's critical).

Cheers