I put this in the General group, since there are several topics this touches.

I'm trying to create sign-in sheets for a series of meetings we have on a
regular basis. For the last set of meetings, I did this with mail merge
successfully, but would like to make it easier for the next 10 sets of
meetings we will be having. Also, the format of the page, while functional,
is hardly worth admiring.

I used the merge feature to bring in the date, time, session name, and teams
invited at the top of the page. Under that heading, I placed a series of
lines in two columns. It took a number of tries with different methods to
get that, but the formatting is not very stable. Any changes anywhere, and
it gets thrown off.

So my first question: Is there a best way to get the two columns of
horizontal lines with a fairly stable format?

Next, I want to set up a template that I can use. Each time we have these
sets of meetings, I need to create new sign-in sheets. The meetings in each
block of meetings vary on date, topics, times, etc. I'm not sure how to set
up a template from scratch.

Third: Once I merge the file, I want to print out all the pages, but I
would like the footer to have a page number so I can quickly put the pages
back in order. Last time, I had to go page by page, since each "merge" was a
new section. Is there an easier way to have consecutive numbers on the
pages? I suppose I could have consecutive numbers in my Excel file and just
pull those into the footer, but is there a way in Word to number the sections
consecutively as though they were page numbers?

Fourth: I also want to set up a template for the files we will be taking
minutes in. The goal here is to have a standard format for the minutes and
to fill in information ahead of time such as the scheduled meeting time,
date, topic, etc. What I did last time is use the merge function to create a
large file that contained the shell for one meeting's minutes on each page.
Then I copied each page into a new file so that I had one file for each of
the meetings. Is there an easier way to do this?

At least I had no problem with the merge itself, using an existing Excel
file for the data source. That part was slick.

Thanks for any help you can give me.