Mail Merge (2003)

[johnhutchison]

I have an automated Mail Merge performed from Access. There is a screen shot below of part of the merge template.

Some of the recipients of this letter do not have a partner. In these cases we would like to remove the second bullet point from the letter. Can I automate this?

<UL><LI>There is yes/no field "No Partner Available" in the query used for the merge.
<LI>I tried making the whole of the second bullet point a merge field, with the text you see included in a calculated field in the query, but this does not work very well.
<LI>As a temporary measure I have created another merge field that prints the text "No Partner' in large red bold text at the top of the letter so the users can manually edit out this paragraph before printing.[/list]How can I do this "properly" ?

[jscher2000]

An analogy: Mail merges for letters or address labels often contain IF fields testing for whether a merge field contains certain address data, and only inserting a line if they do. I don't have any examples close at hand, but you can find some on this board or on Microsoft's site.

[johnhutchison]

Thanks for that. This points me in the right direction, but I have some learning to do here.

My feeling is this case is made a bit more complicated because the text in question

<UL><LI>is a bullet point
<LI>has some bold text
<LI>contains a merge field[/list]but I will experiment and see how I go.

[jscher2000]

If the automatic bullets create a problem, consider creating your own style with a hanging-indent and manually inserted bullets for this part of the document.

[macropod]

Hi John,

When working with conditional text that includes different formatting from the surrounding text (eg headings or bullet points), I find it useful to attach the field to the following paragraph and include the paragraph marker for the non-standard text inside the field. You can see an example of this is my Date Calc tutorial(<post#=249902>post 249902</post#>), under the heading "Use a date test to provide pre-printing instructions".