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Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Products: Word & Access 2003 Professional
Hello MVP's, Although I have been working with Word and mail merges for many years I have never had the need to resize variable text "on-the-fly" until now. Normally, I set up documents this complex through a piece of software called PrintShop Mail, which is as sweet for this type of funtion as it is expensive. However, I am faced with a problem that I must somehow resolve through Word (so long as it is capable) because the documents I am using for this particular job were already laid out in Word and I do not have the time needed to change these to my PrintShop Mail software. In short, I have eight individual documents that run a mailmerge from multiple Access queries. Since this is a custom billing program for members of an organization, most of the information throughout each of the docs is custom to the individual member, thus, these docs are filled with text boxes throughout. The merged results are then printed on a billing form that is pre-printed with multiple boxes, many of which are filled with the variable data from the merge. One specific text box (the "Message" box) could contain any of 28 different messages depending on the field value from the corresponding query. The whole program is difficult enough as it is but I've managed to get through it somehow from month to month. The problem became a problem when my client decided that they no longer like the the way the "Message" looks within the assigned box on the form. Since the message box on the form is pre-printed with a border, every message must fit within the boundaries of the box. These 28 messages could vary from a single sentence to a whole paragraph of five sentences. In the past, I was able to assign the largest font that would accomodate for the longest message. The text was then centered inside the text box, both horizontally and vertically. Of course, whenever a short message appears, the text looks too small inside the box and the client no longer wants to do it this way. They want me to shrink and expand the font size based on message size to fill the box as much as possible. As I mentioned above, PrintShop Mail is made for this kind of gig but it's not something I know how to do in Word, it it's even possible? I found every option to resize the text box to the text but not the other way around. I have read every knowledge base article that talks about merges and text formatting but can't find anything in regards to conditional sizing of text. You guys are my last resource as I will not be able to keep the client around if I can't get this to work on my next mailing, which happens to be this week! It is too late to begin the layouts in PrintShop Mail since the front end of the program takes me forever to get done leaving no extra time to work on the docs except for the merges. What really bothers me is that I have seen this before on some document I received at one time from another client but I can't find it to save my @r$e! The text, not the box, would resize based on length with each record but I didn't have time to see how it was done. I am in need of serious help and running out of time. Any suggestion or known solution to this problem would be heavenly. Thanks in advance for any words of wisdom (and for reading my novel?) |
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