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thatangrykid thatangrykid is offline
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Default Perform mathematical calculations with merge fields

Thanks for the help. I'll repay the favor by never coming here again.


"Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote:

There are no moderators in these newsgroups and when people post under names
such as thatangrykid into a thread posted by cjlatta where, at least I
thought my last response should have fixed the issue, it was not an
unreasonable question to ask, otherwise I would have been quite likely to
have just said "See my previous response"

In your case, while I would not use mailmerge to create documents such as
this, if you want to get the product of a mailmerge field and the content of
a bookmark, you need to use a { REF bookmarkname } field to get the contents
of the bookmark

The calculation would then be

{ = { MERGEFIELD fieldname } * { REF bookmarkname } }

If you are getting syntax errors, the best way to get help would be to
include in your post the field construction that you have that is giving the
error.

--
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

"thatangrykid" wrote in message
...
I posted the question in this thread because it is exactly what I'm having
a
problem with - performing calculations using merge fields. I have become
accustomed to getting yelled at by moderators for starting another thread
with the same subject, so I opted to post under this. Sorry if this too
is
wrong.

As for the problem, I don't know how granular you want me to get, so I'll
start from the very beginning and apologize if it's long.

The document I'm trying to build is an invoice that sales would be able to
generate invoices with from our sales system. Searching the internet, I
came
upon a template that seemed like what I was looking for. One row across
citing Product Name, Product Unit Price and the last giving the Total
Price
for the product. A Grand Total column totals all the lines above it using
=SUM(TOTAL). As our product is a software service sold on a yearly basis,
it
would be ideal to have some way for the one template to accommodate every
multi-year scenario we have. I used the ASK code to prompt the user to
enter
in the number of years that the deal was for. This value is stored in a
bookmark called YEARS, and this in turn is used in a field that calculates
the cost per year.

So far as I can tell, I need the proper syntax to multiply a mergefield by
a
bookmark and have it format as a dollar amount. I need to multiply the
Product Unit Price mergefield by the value entered into the YEARS bookmark
by
the user to get the Total Price for each product on each line of the
invoice.
Adding a quantity field with a fixed number is not possible because of the
way finance set up the sales system. I found a page in the Microsoft Help
and Support site titled "WD: Performing Calculations in a Mail Merge
Field"
which had some examples of calculations, but every time I try entering the
formulas into the word document, it gives me the "!SyntaxError" message.

I hope this explains my problem better and thank you for any help you can
give me.

"Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote:

Is this a continuation of the original thread under which it appears or a
new and different situation.

You need to give full information of what you are starting with and what
you
want to achieve if you want to get assistance that will lead to a
solution
of your problem. Sometimes, just describing the way that you have going
about trying to achieve something is not sufficient, particularly when,
with
the full knowledge of what it is, that turns out to either an
inappropriate,
or at least not the best method of going about it.

--
Regards.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

"thatangrykid" wrote in message
...
Hi,
I've been smashing my head against the cube wall for the past few days
trying to get a calculation out of the mail merge fields I have set up
in
a
table. I have harnessed the power of =SUM(ABOVE) to get my Grand
Total,
and
I also discovered the Bookmark function so that the users can enter in
the
number of years the deal is for and have used that number for
calculations.
But in order to express the Total for each product, I can't seem to
figure
out a way to take the Bookmarked quantity number and multiply it by the
Unit
Price without getting an error message during the merge.