I want to thank both of you for your answers. Wow! How easy was WordPerfect
to do merges!
--
Diane


"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

WordPerfect always had a more powerful equivalent of Word's "field
language".

The best you can really do "out of the box" in Word is
a. to use an ASK or FILLIN field to pause and ask a question
b. ideally, all per-recipient information would be included in your
data source, but you can obviously only manage that if you are in a good
position to manipulate your data how you want. e.g. if it is in an
Access database, any table that referenced a recipient could be "joined"
with the recipient data using a query. Probably the simplest way to hold
information that is neither in the data source nor "in Word" is to put
it in a Word document, bookmark it with a bookmark name that can be
built from the recipient identifier, and use INCLUDETEXT to include it.

For example, suppose you have a standard recipient identifier that's
just an ID number - 1,2, etc., and that number is in a column in your
data source called ID. Then if you put each recipient's address in a
Word document, and bookmark recipient 1's address as r1address,
recipient 2's address as r2address and so on, you can use the nested field

{ INCLUDETEXT "the path name of the recipient data document" "r{
MERGEFIELD ID }address" }

However, this assumes that you have a bookmark for every ID - if you
don't things immediately become more complicated.

Otherwise, you probably have to turn to VBA or another programming
language, and then you get a different set of opportunities, limitations
and problems.

The "official" way to do stuff during the merge is to use Word VBA and
Word Events. In that case, you can write a Word macro that will be
invoked immediately before each record is merged. The macro can access
the data in the record and - for example - given an appropriate
recipient identifier, could look up that recipient's record in Outlook
Contacts and insert it.

There are other possibilities.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
Visit Londinium at http://www.ralphwatson.tv

Diane S wrote:
Back in the day when I used Word Perfect, when merging letters you were able
to put a pause in the merge so that the merge would stop at a specific field
and you could enter information that was specific to that particular
addressee. You could also set up a merge with information specific to each
addressee, i.e., different class times, dates, etc., and merge all of that
into the template. Perhaps Word does that also but I have never been able to
figure it out. Any suggestions?