[macropod[_2_]]

Hi Peter,


Properly constructed, that would allow you to use macropod's method (mentioned by Doug) although AFAIK that actually has to work by
merging to a new document which you would then have to split and email.

Actually, instead of requiring the user to split & email an output document, the technique in my tutorial uses a two-stage merge
process (with a macro in between) to generate the emails.

--
Cheers
macropod
[Microsoft MVP - Word]


"Peter Jamieson" wrote in message ...
To do a mailmerge direct to email, the main constraint is that you have to choose a column that contains the e-mail address for
each email the merge is going to produce. In that case, you would at the very least need to reorganise your data source so that
you have either
a. one or more records for each email address. In that case you could either construct a merge that consumed one or more records
for each address.
b. each email address in a separate field in the record, which is obviously only feasible if you have a known maximum e-mail
address count per record, preferably rather a small one. e.g. if you always have 3 addresses and 6 sales records, you would
probably be OK. In that case you would actually need to do 3 merges, choosing a different field as the email address in each case.

IMO (a) would ultimately be simpler (i.e. if you have to split up the email address field at some point, why not separate the data
into separate records, with the sales data for each email address in each record while you're at it? It's probably a fairly simple
piece of Access or Excel VBA to do that) and essential if the number of e-mail addresses per record is actually either large or
unconstrained.

There is then the question of how to deal with the multiple sales records. Again, if it is only ever 2 per email, I would probably
separate the 2 sales records into 2 sets of fields in the same record at the same time as I did (a) above. At that point you could
create a merge to email with a simple 2-row table (one row for each sales record) and produce one e-mail for each record in your
reorganised data source. If on the other hand there could be an unlimited number of sales records, there are at least a couple of
ways you could go:
i. generate a single table with one record for each email/sales record combination. Properly constructed, that would allow you
to use macropod's method (mentioned by Doug) although AFAIK that actually has to work by merging to a new document which you would
then have to split and email.
ii. generate a parent table (one record per email) and a child table (multiple sales records per email. In order to use Mailmerge
to merge /that/ you could
- use the parent table as the mail merge data source
- use Word's Mailmerge events to process the mail merge main document for each record in the data source prior to merge. In
that processing you could for example use ADO to get the child records related to the current parent and insert them into a table.

(you could actually do that with method (i) as well but it's probably a bit simpler with method 2)

Alternatively, it might be simpler to use (say) Excel or Access VBA to process each email address in turn and generate your email
(either by generating a Word document or otherwise) either by creating each document from scratch using VBA, or (for example)
using { DOCVARIABLE } fields in Word instead of { MERGEFIELD } fields and updating the values of the appropriate Word Document
Variables in your VBA code.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

Mark wrote:
I could use either Access or Excel as my data source, I currently have it in Excel.

WRT relationships of the records - you understood correctly as (b) below. "Peter Jamieson" wrote:

Is it possible for a mail merge record in Word 2007 to have an embedded table
that contains more than one related record?
Word data sources are in essence simple relations with no repeating elements. Word does not have any general-purpose built-in
ways to split multiple-valued elements into multiple records.

In this case,
a. what is the data source? Is it an Access 2007 database with multi-valued elements, or something else?
b. are the 3 email addresses related to the 6 sales by quarter records in the most obvious way (i.e. the first two sales
records belong with the first email address, the 3rd and 4th sales records with th e 2nd email address, and so on)? Or what/

(Not sure I can help even then, but IMO anyone trying to solve this problem would need to know the answers)

Peter Jamieson

"MarkWey" wrote in message ...
Is it possible for a mail merge record in Word 2007 to have an embedded table
that contains more than one related record?

My data source contains a column with 3 email addresses and another column
with 6 records €“ Sales by Quarter. Id like the Word output to produce three
emails, containing a table with 2 merged records in each.

Thanks in advance!