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Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
John Tesler
 
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Default Trouble with Mail Merge

Hi guys

I'm quite new to mail merge, and have been having some trouble for days now.
I've found numerous examples on the Internet, and have had some success, but
cannot complete the solution.

I have a small (fixed number of 12 records) and simple Excel database. Each
row is a new record. Let's just say each record has a person's name and
their favourite colour.

What I want to do is, in Word, say:

"The following people's favourite colour is blue: John and Tim."
"The following people's favourite colour is green: Tony and Bill."
etc etc

I want to achieve this by cycling through the database, finding the people's
records that contain "blue", and write down their forename. Sounds pretty
simple, but the problem is that there are several people who have different
favourite colours, and the records are in no order.

Firstly, I tried something like this:


The following people's favourite colour is blue: { IF {MERGEFIELD Colour } =
"Blue" { MERGEFIELD "Name" } "" }{ NEXT }

etc etc



This works absolutely fine, and inserts the correct names. However, when I
come to the next colour, green, it doesn't work (I assume because I have
come to the end of the database?).



I then thought I'd try setting bookmarks then referring to them later once
they've been stored. For argument's sake, let's say there will always be 2
people that like the same colour; no more and no less.



So I did something like this:



{ SET blue { IF { MERGEFIELD Colour } = "Blue" { MERGEFIELD "Name" }
"" } }{ NEXT }{ SET blue { IF { MERGEFIELD Colour } = "Blue" { MERGEFIELD
"Name" } "" } }



The problem here is that the bookmark gets overwritten by the second name
and also it doesn't solve the problem of storing names for each colour!

I'm in a real helpless position and don't know what else to try! Any help
would be much appreciated. Many thanks in advance.