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Peter Jamieson Peter Jamieson is offline
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Default Automated Mail Merge With Excel Sheet containing data.

The simplest approach is probably to use quotes, or preferably a character
sequence that you know never appears in the data, merge to an output
document, then use VBA (say) to do a global find/replace to remove the
quotes or character sequence.

Other than that, I think you would have to merge with another format.
However,
a. the only one that I know (off the top of my head) will preserve the
spaces is to use a Word document with a table as the data source, and that
has a limit of 63 or 64 columns. To try it, you can copy/paste your Excel
sheet into a Word document, using Word Edit|"Paste Special" and selecting
Formatted Text (RTF) as the format.
b. you would either have to automate Excel and Word to copy/paste (somehow
or other) the data into Word, or maybe you could start with whatever source
you are using to populate your Excel sheet. However, in that case, the
question of how to get the data into Word while preserving the spaces does
not go away easily.

Peter Jamieson

"ksg" wrote in message
...
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I can not right justify and have the
data look right. Here is an example of the data:

907__BASIC MET PROF 518__CBC W/DIFF 106__AFP
1600__COMP MET PROF 520__CBC W/O DIFF 428__CEA
915__LIPID PROF 546__PLATELET CT 210__CA 19-9
1601__HEP FUNC PROF 276__IRON PROF
Each line is a formatted line of text that I am treating as a merge field.

There is a lot of this data and there is no way to reliably parse the data
into individual fields. When I merge the delimited file manually using
Word
it works fine with quotes, but using the program the merge document prints
with the quotes.

If you have any other ideas, please let me know.

Thanks



"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

If you want to right-align all these texts you would probably be better
off
putting a right-aligned tab in Word immediately before the appropriate
merge
field.

[Otherwise, unfortunately all the connection methods that Word can use to
get data from Excel strip off both leading and trailing blanks, except
the
Excel converter, which is no longer provided with Word (since version
2002
or 2003, I forget which) or in the add-on converter pack. If you really
want, I think you can get a copy of the converter from Graham Mayor's
download page at http://www.gmayor.com/downloads.htm . Be aware that the
converter has been withdrawn for a reason, has not been maintained for
some
time, and will always pop up a dialog whenever you connect using it]

Peter Jamieson

"ksg" wrote in message
...
I have an automated mail merge program that accepts data from different
systems. The data is in an Excel Sheet. Some of the data has blanks
in
the
data. The data would look something like this:

" DataField1"
" DataFields2"
etc.

I need to keep the leading blanks so the data will line up on the
merged
document.

I have tried enclosing the data in "" in the Excel Cell. This keeps
the
blanks, but the quotes print out on the document.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks