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Next Record If Question (Word 2003)
It is my understanding that inserting the Next Record If statement in a mail
merge would allow me to only merge records that meet the criteia I set . I do not seem to be able to make this work. (Next Record If = Chicago should only return records with Chicago in the city field) I can use the Skip Record If command to restrict merged records to whatever criteria I choose. I am using the Insert Word Field command from the Mail Merge toolbar. I understand that I could filter the data source but I would like to make this work. Thank you in advance! |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Next Record If Question (Word 2003)
(Next Record If = Chicago should
only return records with Chicago in the city field) Not really. What Next record if does is move to the next record if the current record meets the criteria. However, it does not then /re-evaluate/ the condition - Word evaluates each field in the Mail Merge Main Document sequentially (and does whatever it does in nested fields) - it never loops. So if you have your Next record if at the beginning of your mail merge main document and you have records like 1. Los Angeles 2. Chicago 3. New York 4. Chicago 5. Chicago 6. Houston 7. Chicago 8. Chicago 9. Chicago 10. Chicago 11. Las Vegas .. Word should produce output for 1,3,5,6,8,10,11 (I think!) which contains some Chicagos. When encounters a Skip Record If and the criteria are met, the difference is that it cancels processing of the current copy of the mail merge main document. So in the simple case where you have a skip record if Chicago at the beginning and no next record fields it does behave as if you had excluded all the Chicago records from the data source. However, if for example you have a label merge with a Skip record if Chicago in each label, then Word will cancel the current page of labels (including non-Chicago records) as soon as it encounters a Chicago record. If you have 21 labels per sheet and Chicago appears somewhere in every 21 records then you get no output. It is easy to get the impression from Word Help over the years that Microsoft "deprecated" { SKIPIF } a long time ago as it recommends that you use the filtering options. But of in fact none of these approaches does eaxctly the same thing. Personally I think there is at least one field missing - what is needed is something like a { NEXT UNTIL } or some such. But I think Microsoft's view has probably long been "anything more complicated than the simplest mailmerges is something you ought to get programmed using VBA or .NET" Peter Jamieson "Mark Watlock" wrote in message ... It is my understanding that inserting the Next Record If statement in a merge would allow me to only merge records that meet the criteia I set . I do not seem to be able to make this work. (Next Record If = Chicago should only return records with Chicago in the city field) I can use the Skip Record If command to restrict merged records to whatever criteria I choose. I am using the Insert Word Field command from the Mail Merge toolbar. I understand that I could filter the data source but I would like to make this work. Thank you in advance! |
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