Let's say you have entered the ctrl-F9 braces and all the text you want and
you have soemthing that looks like this (use Alt-F9 to show all the text in
all the fields).
{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD myfield }" = "" "" "beforetext:: { MERGEFIELD
myfield \*Charformat }" }
Then you can select the text
"beforetext: "
and make it bold in exactly the same way that you would make ordinary text
bold (e.g. click the B button on the formatting toolbar).
Then select the entire { MERGEFIELD myfield \*Charformat } field, and make
it italic in the same way that you would make ordinary text italic.
--
Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
"********Meg" wrote in message
...
I understand what you are saying for the most part.
Confusion lies in saying
so what I am trying to say is "
If this field is not blank, then put in the field (in italics) and put
"this text" before the field (in bold)
I'm just not getting this formatting down. right.
--
Meg
"Peter Jamieson" wrote in message
...
Just to spell it out as best I can:
The text within these field codes is ordinary text (although the special
() are not) - once you can see it (use Alt-F9 to "toggle" between "view
field codes" and "view field results") you can select and format it just
as you would format ordinary text in a Word document.
However, every field code does something different, and in some cases the
field code will discard your formatting, which is why the formatting does
not work within a { MERGEFIELD } field. It does, however work (broadly
speaking) when you format the "result text" of an IF field.
--
Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
"********Meg" wrote in message
...
thanks, I think I understand what you are saying, but I'm not clear in
how to do the formatting. This is VERY new for me.
here is what I have
{mergefeild Required Reading\b "required reading:'}
I want the text Required Reading (which is the text that will appear if
there is anything in the field ) to be bold and the content of the field
to be italics (i.e., it's a book title so it should be).
Ex:
Required Reading (in bold): How to use excel, by So and So (in italics)
thanks for your help, if this can work. it would be GREAT!
Meg
"Microsoft Public Groups" wrote in
message ...
Assuming you are using
{ MERGEFIELD myfield \b "beforetext: " }
I don't think you can achieve the formatting you need using that
technique
(even replacing "beforetext" by "{ QUOTE beforetext: \*Charformat }
and
formatting the Q the way you want does not work).
Instead, try
{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD myfield }" = "" "" "beforetext:: { MERGEFIELD
myfield\*Charformat }" }
then format beforetext: the way you want it and format the M of the
second
MERGEFIELD the way you want it.
Ensure all the {} are ht especial field code braces you can insert
using
ctrl-F9
Peter Jamieson
"********Meg" wrote in
message
...
I recently learned (very happily, I might add) to edit a mail merge
field
to include text before or after that field. Another fabulous feature
is
that the text will not appear if there is no data in the datasource for
that particular record. This is a very cool feature. (office 2003)
However, I want to format both the text that is before the field and
the
actual data in the field (one would be bold and one would be italics)
When I change the info in my form, it looks good, but when I do the
merge,
all of the formatting disappears. If I italicize the information in
the
data source document , it looses it's formatting as well.
any ideas?
thanks
--
Meg