Hi Peter,
My data had not hard (line or paragraph) breaks in Excel.
I think it's a bit much to expect mail merge to multi-paragraph data and
apply such formatting.
I am not sure how real the OP's description of his requirement is, but if it
was just the static text (Line #) that was to be outdented, I would setup
the main document as a two column table with and If...then...Else construct
in each column, the one in the first column returning the Line # if the data
in the field was not blank and the one in the second column returning the
data if it was not blank.
--
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, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com
"Peter Jamieson" wrote in message
...
FWIW, my experiment with Windows 7 and Word 2010 beta had exactly the same
result as my experiment with Vista and Word 2007. However, so far I have
been using data that has no internal hard line breaks (i.e. only laid out
using automatic wrapped, whether it was in Word or Excel. If I put one or
more hard breaks in the Excel text for "Line 1" (say), then the first part
of Line 1 still retains the wrong formatting, but all the other parts of
Line 1 are OK. Which is not quite what I would have expected either.
Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
On 22/02/2010 09:57, Doug Robbins - Word MVP wrote:
Hi Peter,
The original test would have been on a 32-bit version of Vista (I cannot
confirm that it was SP2 at the moment, but would be very surprised if it
was not) and Word 2007 (also almost certainly SP2 (but I cannot confirm
at the moment)
I have just retested on a machine running Word 2007 SP2 under Windows 7,
with an Excel 2010 data source (while I retained Word, I dumped the rest
of Office when I installed 2010) and using the same field construction I
get the expected result with one minor exception (which I had also
experienced on the other installation)
That is that the result of the first field in the first record appears
as follows (here, I have manually inserted carriage returns and tabs to
show the result
Line 1: On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed
to coordinate with the
overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert
tables, headers,
footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When
you create
pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current
document look
Note that there is an empty "line" between the first and second lines.
There is however no carriage return or new line "character" after the
"the" at the end of the first line and according to the Paragraph Format
dialog, the paragraph is formatted with single line spacing.
If I change the line spacing in the Format Paragraph dialog from Single
to Double and then back to Single again, this mystery space disappears.
If I click undo to undo both instances of the paragraph formatting, the
mystery line does not re-appear.
If instead of using the Paragraph formatting dialog, I place the
selection after the word "the" at the end of the first line and press
delete, the first letter of the first word on the next line is deleted.
Likewise, if I place the selection after the word "the" at the end of
the first line and press the right arrow key, the selection moves the
after the first letter of the first word on the next line.
Apart from this anomaly with the result of the first field of the first
record, all of the other paragraphs are formatted with the required
hanging indent.