Hi Sandra,

I didn't provide the details because I hoped what you had would be enough.

NB - you can search by going to groups.google.com and entering a few useful
keywords - if you search for INCLUDETEXT or AUTOTEXT and the name of one of
the regular contributors here such as Meister Robbins Mayor or Jamieson you
will probably find rather a lot of articles on these subjects. You can use
the advanced search there to restrict the search to the more recent
articles, which is usually helpful.

This is what you do, at least for INCLUDETEXT

Create a separate document - let's call it c;\myparas\myparas.doc

Insert the text chunks you want to use into that document.

Select each paragraph in turn and use Insert|Bookmark to bookmark each
paragraph with a different name - let's call them Para1,Para2,...,Para20. It
may or may not be useful to bookmark the text chunks without their final
paragraph marks (click the Show/Hide button in the standard toolbar to help
you do that).

Position the insertion point at the beginning of the document (so it's a
"point" selection) and insert a bookmark called Para0

In your mail merge main document, use

{ INCLUDETEXT "c:\\myparas\\myparas.doc" { IF "{ MERGEFIELD Para1 \*Upper }"
= "Y" "Para1" "Para0" }
}{ INCLUDETEXT "c:\\myparas\\myparas.doc" { IF "{ MERGEFIELD Para2
\*Upper }" = "Y" "Para2" "Para0" }
}{ INCLUDETEXT "c:\\myparas\\myparas.doc" { IF "{ MERGEFIELD Para3
\*Upper }" = "Y" "Para3" "Para0" }
}

etc.

As before, all the {} need to be the field braces you can insert using
ctrl-F9.

You have to do the INCLUDETEXT and IFs this way around or you end up with
{ IF condition "{ INCLUDETEXT something }" "" } and the same problems as you
probably had before.

There are other ways to do this, but I think that's probably one of the
simpler methods.

Peter Jamieson


"Sandra via OfficeKB.com" u5657@uwe wrote in message
news:60ab7b9b8489b@uwe...
I currently have a database holding details of 400+ members.

Each member is to receive a letter containing standard text. Depending on
circumstances each member will need variable paragraph(s) inserting in the
same place within the document (somewhere in the middle of the standard
text).

There are approximately 20 different paragraphs and one member might need
two
of the standard paragraphs inserting whilst another might need nine of the
standard paragraphs inserting, etc.

I can't think of any way to link the individual paragraphs to each
member's
record in the database to enable me to merge. Is this possible?

At the moment the paragraphs are just one long document.

The only way I can think of is to save each individual paragraph as an
autotext entry and then insert the required paragraph into the individual
letters, although this would mean re-typing all the names, address,
salutation again.

Peter Jamieson kindly explained IF fields. However, when I looked at the
paragraphs to be inserted many contained subheadings, parts of the text
were
in colour, bullets, etc. Peter then suggested I search newsgroups for
examples of INCLUDETEXT, AUTOTEXT, etc. Can anyone please help with this
procedure?

Regards
Sandra

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