[brainout]

Originally Posted by Graham Mayor

An Excel address list will work fine (as will a Word table). You just have
to think logically about what information you may want to extract from the
list in order to produce the types of documents you require eg you may have
the following fields/columns

...
or you could use Outlook to store your client data and merge from Outlook -
http://www.gmayor.com/mailmerge_from_outlook.htm

You may find http://www.gmayor.com/mail_merge_lab...th_word_xp.htm or
http://www.gmayor.com/merge_labels_with_word_2007.htm a useful primer for
mail merge (not simply labels).
--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP
My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org

Since my question is similar, it seemed better to bump this thread rather than start a new topic. Here it's a bit more sophisticated. I run my actuarial pension business around old Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.01 spreadsheets, in DOS window, in XP. Run mail merges in DOS (window) with Multimate Advantage II, using Borland Sidekick as a kind of script to make the merge work. Because XP can't handle Sidekick, I print the merges from a 486. Would like to modernize this procedure.

Over the years, I've had to migrate the rest of the practice to Windows, which means Word. Can't get the right formatting I want in Multimate, so since the 1990's have been trying to figure out how to make Word 'read' the spreadsheet database. I can only get it to read sequentially. That's too much hassle, so have kept using DOS machines to do the merge.

However, After reading your articles here in your quote, the following idea struck me:

1. Import the 1-2-3 worksheet into Excel 2002 (latest version which I want to use, because it reads wk1 files). Lying 'underneath' the import, is the exact same layout (all my spreadsheets have the same layout), but formatted for Excel. So all the same range names, macros (which don't work in Excel), etc. as in the worksheet I just imported.

2. COPY FORMULAS into the underlying worksheet, so that it ends up having the same values, too.

3. Lying ON TOP (i.e., sheet1 renamed to whatever), are separate databases which 'read' the bottom-most Excel formatted sheet columns. Each such database is formatted and ordered and named to correspond to the merge document field names I'll have in my Word documents. In sequence, if necessary, which means a lot of redundancy.

RESULTS:

A. So if one of the merge documents is a participant 401k or Defined Benefit benefit statement for the plan year, it will extract data from that topmost sheet's range for that statement.

B. So for the Summary Plan Description merge document, it will only extract data from its own other range also in the topmost sheet's range for the SPD.

C. So for the Summary Annual Report, it will only extract data from the Summary Annual Report range, again from that topmost sheet's range.

All this data is actually in the Lotus 1-2-3 worksheet, but since Word can't access that sheet directly, and can't read it either from the massive duplicate in the bottom-most sheet in Excel, it seems I have to create multiple smaller ranges in another sheet within the workbook, in order to get the merge to work at all.

I'm not even sure the above will work, and wondered if you'd care to opine. Thank you for whatever time you care to spend on reply!