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Doug Robbins - Word MVP Doug Robbins - Word MVP is offline
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Default Mail Merge and paragraph formatting

Have you actually executed the merge to a new document?

It turned out that Peter was only previewing the results and in this case,
the preview does NOT show you what the result will look like.

--
Hope this helps,

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

Please reply only to the newsgroups unless you wish to obtain my services on
a paid professional basis.

"Seamus O'Connell" wrote in
message ...
I forgot to add that the Hanging Indent worked under Office 2003. This only
came up when I moved to Office 2007. Seamus
--
Seamus O'Connell


"Seamus O'Connell" wrote:

Doug and Peter €“

Many thanks for putting in so much work on this problem.

It is a real situation, though it does not matter that much if I cant
get
the result I want. Its the directory for a small charity in London. It
lists
the fixed information for a person, name, address, email, phone,
qualifications, then lists any optional information they have given in
none,
one, or more of four possible categories. Each line of the optional
information starts with category description then continues with the
supplied
text. The document is more readable with hanging indents. But I can
instead
bold the category descriptions.

My machine is an elderly PC running under XP Home + SP3. Im using
Microsoft
Office Professional 2007 Version 12.0 Build 6504 (according to a system
info
table).

My data has not got any paragraph marks or other breaks in the text in
Excel. The only paragraph mark is the one in the Mail merge expression.

I tried changing the paragraph formatting from Hanging to First Line
indent
and the lines all ended left-justified.

Im not sure what conclusion to reach. Peter seems to have got the same
result as me, but Doug seems not to. Its no great problem if I cant do
what
I want. These things start as an interesting puzzle but if youre not
careful
you find yourself spiralling down a bottomless pit of diminishing
returns.

Again, many thanks for all the effort youve put in, and if you do decide
to
look into it further I would certainly be interested to know the results.

Apologies for not replying more promptly. I asked for notification of
replies, or at least I tried to, but Im not getting them.

Best wishes, Seamus
--
Seamus O'Connell


"Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote:

Hi Peter,

I just recreated my main document so that I could send it to you and
discovered something else of interest - on saving the resulting
document
immediately after it was created by executing the merge (i.e. without
making
any other adjustments) the mystery line was removed.

--
Hope this helps,

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

Please reply only to the newsgroups unless you wish to obtain my
services on
a paid professional basis.

"Peter Jamieson" wrote in message
...
Hi Doug,

I think it's a bit much to expect mail merge to multi-paragraph
data and
apply such formatting.

Without further input from the OP, I certainly wouldn't want to spend
any
more time on it.

What specifically interested me was that both you and I seem to have
set
up or Mail Merge Main Document with identical text and formatting,
and yet
we have different results - i.e., "what could account for that?" And
of
course there's the question of "what ought to happen?"

I don't think the OP's expectation was unreasonable. But the question
"what do I do if Word simply does not behave the way I expect/want"
is not
easily answered. I suppose in the end there has to be a manual
postprocessing step and that someone would have to
a. open the output document
b. identify the paragraphs to be fixed (somehow)
c. apply the fix
d. check the results (how?!)
e. save/print when all is well


Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

On 22/02/2010 19:35, Doug Robbins - Word MVP wrote:
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.