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#1
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How to embed Control Characters into data feeding a merge field.
I have a merge field that gets fed text type data from a database.
Somewhere within the text source I want to say highlight a PORTION by making it bold (note - NOT the whole field). What control characters do I embed?. Is there a list of other control chars. say italic etc. -- Regards Tom |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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How to embed Control Characters into data feeding a merge field.
That is not something that can be done with mail merge out of the box. You
could achieve it by inserting some control characters in the data and then execute the merge to a new document and then use a wildcard search and replace in some VBA code to locate the strings between the control characters and apply the desired formatting. -- Hope this helps. Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my services on a paid consulting basis. Doug Robbins - Word MVP "ThomasAJ" wrote in message ... I have a merge field that gets fed text type data from a database. Somewhere within the text source I want to say highlight a PORTION by making it bold (note - NOT the whole field). What control characters do I embed?. Is there a list of other control chars. say italic etc. -- Regards Tom |
#3
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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How to embed Control Characters into data feeding a merge fiel
So I cannot insert some special ASCII/ANSI type chars in the actual data that
Word will interpret as say bold? The control chars you are talking about are ones that I invent for my VBA code to locate and turn the 'target text' into bold. Am I understanding you correctly? -- Regards Tom "Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote: That is not something that can be done with mail merge out of the box. You could achieve it by inserting some control characters in the data and then execute the merge to a new document and then use a wildcard search and replace in some VBA code to locate the strings between the control characters and apply the desired formatting. -- Hope this helps. Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my services on a paid consulting basis. Doug Robbins - Word MVP "ThomasAJ" wrote in message ... I have a merge field that gets fed text type data from a database. Somewhere within the text source I want to say highlight a PORTION by making it bold (note - NOT the whole field). What control characters do I embed?. Is there a list of other control chars. say italic etc. -- Regards Tom |
#4
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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How to embed Control Characters into data feeding a merge fiel
Yes, Tom. That is what I had meant.
-- Hope this helps. Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my services on a paid consulting basis. Doug Robbins - Word MVP "ThomasAJ" wrote in message ... So I cannot insert some special ASCII/ANSI type chars in the actual data that Word will interpret as say bold? The control chars you are talking about are ones that I invent for my VBA code to locate and turn the 'target text' into bold. Am I understanding you correctly? -- Regards Tom "Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote: That is not something that can be done with mail merge out of the box. You could achieve it by inserting some control characters in the data and then execute the merge to a new document and then use a wildcard search and replace in some VBA code to locate the strings between the control characters and apply the desired formatting. -- Hope this helps. Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my services on a paid consulting basis. Doug Robbins - Word MVP "ThomasAJ" wrote in message ... I have a merge field that gets fed text type data from a database. Somewhere within the text source I want to say highlight a PORTION by making it bold (note - NOT the whole field). What control characters do I embed?. Is there a list of other control chars. say italic etc. -- Regards Tom |
#5
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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How to embed Control Characters into data feeding a merge field.
You can try the following trick if you like but be aware that it has
significant limitations (e.g. you probably can't have more than the maximum Word column count) so test thoroughly before committing: Instead of writing a plain text file, write an HTML format file, using standard HTML formatting tags. As faras I know you can reduce the amount of HTML you need by leaving out HTML, BODY. But keep the table tags. e.g. table trtdkey/tdtdtext/td/tr trtd1/tdtdplain1 bbold and iitalic/i/b/td/tr trtd2/tdtdplain2 uunderscore/u/td/tr /table You can use th instead of td in the header line (I doubt if it makes any difference to Word, but it might). Make sure every row has the same number of cells. Give the file a .htm extension. Use that as the data source, but instead of inserting MERGEFIELD fields, insert REF fields, e.g. { REF k } and { REF text }. You will probably also need to insert one "real" merge field that evaluates to an empty text string before Word will let you perform the merge. e.g. { { MERGEFIELD k } } may do the trick. When you evaluate these fields, you will probably see "Error! Reference source not found", but if you preview the data, you should see the data + formatting that you included. This relies on the fact that the earliest versions of Windows Word could only use Word documents as a data source, did not have { MERGEFIELD } fields, and just used { fieldname } instead of { MERGEFIELD fieldname }. The behaviour seems to have been carried through until at least Word 2003, but is probably not supported. Using REF is a way to avoid problems where the fieldname is the same as a Word field type such as AUTHOR etc. -- Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk "ThomasAJ" wrote in message ... I have a merge field that gets fed text type data from a database. Somewhere within the text source I want to say highlight a PORTION by making it bold (note - NOT the whole field). What control characters do I embed?. Is there a list of other control chars. say italic etc. -- Regards Tom |
#6
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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How to embed Control Characters into data feeding a merge fiel
Thanks Peter. Interesting but too complicated for my task.
Also it's interesting that embeded CRLFs in text data feeding a merge field causes Word to start a new line within that merge field. Are you all 100% sure that special ASCII/ANSI chars (eg the one for bold) will NOT display a word in bold? Just pushing this a little further -- Regards Tom "Peter Jamieson" wrote: You can try the following trick if you like but be aware that it has significant limitations (e.g. you probably can't have more than the maximum Word column count) so test thoroughly before committing: Instead of writing a plain text file, write an HTML format file, using standard HTML formatting tags. As faras I know you can reduce the amount of HTML you need by leaving out HTML, BODY. But keep the table tags. e.g. table trtdkey/tdtdtext/td/tr trtd1/tdtdplain1 bbold and iitalic/i/b/td/tr trtd2/tdtdplain2 uunderscore/u/td/tr /table You can use th instead of td in the header line (I doubt if it makes any difference to Word, but it might). Make sure every row has the same number of cells. Give the file a .htm extension. Use that as the data source, but instead of inserting MERGEFIELD fields, insert REF fields, e.g. { REF k } and { REF text }. You will probably also need to insert one "real" merge field that evaluates to an empty text string before Word will let you perform the merge. e.g. { { MERGEFIELD k } } may do the trick. When you evaluate these fields, you will probably see "Error! Reference source not found", but if you preview the data, you should see the data + formatting that you included. This relies on the fact that the earliest versions of Windows Word could only use Word documents as a data source, did not have { MERGEFIELD } fields, and just used { fieldname } instead of { MERGEFIELD fieldname }. The behaviour seems to have been carried through until at least Word 2003, but is probably not supported. Using REF is a way to avoid problems where the fieldname is the same as a Word field type such as AUTHOR etc. -- Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk "ThomasAJ" wrote in message ... I have a merge field that gets fed text type data from a database. Somewhere within the text source I want to say highlight a PORTION by making it bold (note - NOT the whole field). What control characters do I embed?. Is there a list of other control chars. say italic etc. -- Regards Tom |
#7
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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How to embed Control Characters into data feeding a merge fiel
Let me put it this way - if you use the ones that Word specifically mentions
in its Autocorrect options dialog (** to surround bold and _ _ to surround italic) in a .txt data source, the field results are /not/ formatted as you might hope. Also it's interesting that embeded CRLFs in text data feeding a merge field causes Word to start a new line within that merge field. Are you all 100% sure that special ASCII/ANSI chars (eg the one for bold) When it comes to the software world, I generally feel I wouldn't be doing my job if I were 100% sure about anything :-) I'm not personally aware of any ANSI/ASCII standard for control characters for bold etc., only the conventions that grew up for marking up e-mails with simple formatting (actually I thought _ _ was supposed to be underscore and / / was supposed to be italic in that scheme, but there you go.) But if you have something else in mind, it should be pretty easy to test... -- Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk "ThomasAJ" wrote in message news Thanks Peter. Interesting but too complicated for my task. Also it's interesting that embeded CRLFs in text data feeding a merge field causes Word to start a new line within that merge field. Are you all 100% sure that special ASCII/ANSI chars (eg the one for bold) will NOT display a word in bold? Just pushing this a little further -- Regards Tom "Peter Jamieson" wrote: You can try the following trick if you like but be aware that it has significant limitations (e.g. you probably can't have more than the maximum Word column count) so test thoroughly before committing: Instead of writing a plain text file, write an HTML format file, using standard HTML formatting tags. As faras I know you can reduce the amount of HTML you need by leaving out HTML, BODY. But keep the table tags. e.g. table trtdkey/tdtdtext/td/tr trtd1/tdtdplain1 bbold and iitalic/i/b/td/tr trtd2/tdtdplain2 uunderscore/u/td/tr /table You can use th instead of td in the header line (I doubt if it makes any difference to Word, but it might). Make sure every row has the same number of cells. Give the file a .htm extension. Use that as the data source, but instead of inserting MERGEFIELD fields, insert REF fields, e.g. { REF k } and { REF text }. You will probably also need to insert one "real" merge field that evaluates to an empty text string before Word will let you perform the merge. e.g. { { MERGEFIELD k } } may do the trick. When you evaluate these fields, you will probably see "Error! Reference source not found", but if you preview the data, you should see the data + formatting that you included. This relies on the fact that the earliest versions of Windows Word could only use Word documents as a data source, did not have { MERGEFIELD } fields, and just used { fieldname } instead of { MERGEFIELD fieldname }. The behaviour seems to have been carried through until at least Word 2003, but is probably not supported. Using REF is a way to avoid problems where the fieldname is the same as a Word field type such as AUTHOR etc. -- Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk "ThomasAJ" wrote in message ... I have a merge field that gets fed text type data from a database. Somewhere within the text source I want to say highlight a PORTION by making it bold (note - NOT the whole field). What control characters do I embed?. Is there a list of other control chars. say italic etc. -- Regards Tom |
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