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Piers Alington Piers Alington is offline
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Default Word 2007 Mail merge - omit blank lines & address block

Hi Graham

Thanks for your quick help on this. I have used CTRL + F9 to insert the
curly brackets as you suggested - this creates a pair of brackets each time.
How do you then create the unbalanced brackets as show in this line...

{Mergefield Field1}{IF {Mergefield FieldThatMayBeEmpty1} "" "¶

.... where you have 2 left hand { { and one right hand } prior to the

Should one of these be simply typed in?

I am not at all clear. Your help woudl be most welcome

Piers

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

You will need to use the individual fields and the simplest method to
suppress blank lines is to conditionally insert the fields that may be blank
and the line breaks that accompany them.

Typing directly in to the document, use CTRL+F9 for the brackets {} and
substitue the names of your fields. Press the enter key where you see ¶ and
nowhere else. Note the quotes "" (plain quotes "" rather than smart quotes
"")

{Mergefield Field1}{IF {Mergefield FieldThatMayBeEmpty1} "" "¶
{Mergefield FieldThatMayBeEmpty1}"}{IF {Mergefield FieldThatMayBeEmpty2}
"" "¶
{Mergefield FieldThatMayBeEmpty2}"}{IF {Mergefield FieldThatMayBeEmpty3}
"" "¶
{Mergefield FieldThatMayBeEmpty3}"}¶
{Mergefield FieldThat'sNot Empty}

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

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



Piers Alington wrote:
I seem to be going round in circles with advice on how to solve a
mail merge problem in Word 2007

I want to omit blank lines from the name and address section of a
mail merge document.

Some advice says 'use the address block'. However, the address block
does not have the person's job title field in it - even though I have
set it to be included in the Optional Information section of the
'Match Fields' section (what exactly is the point of that section if
it doesn't do what it is supposed to?)

So then, the advice is to use separate fields, rather than the
integrated Address Block. Fine, except that then it shows blank lines
where the data source does not have fields populated for address line
2, etc - a common issue and one of the most obvious requirements for
a mail merge function. I cannot find out / work out how to use the
'If... Then... Else' function in the Rules section of the Mail Merge
ribbon; if you select the field 'address line 2' as the field in the
'If Then Else' dialog box with either 'is blank' or 'is not blank',
then what do you do?

I have spent all morning on this - when it should be so simple.
EXTREMELY frustrating. Why is it SO complex to do such a SIMPLE thing?