Mac Forum / Applications / Word / October 2005

<snip>

One method is to use a heap of nested conditional expressions like this:

{ IF { MERGEFIELD surname } <> "" "{MERGEFIELD title } {
MERGEFIELD initials } { MERGEFIELD surname }
" ""}{ IF { MERGEFIELD position } <> "" "{MERGEFIELD postion }
" ""}{ IF { MERGEFIELD a1 } <> "" " { MERGEFIELD a1}
" ""}{ IF { MERGEFIELD a2 } <> "" " { MERGEFIELD a2}
" ""}{ IF { MERGEFIELD a3 } <> "" " { MERGEFIELD a3}
" ""}{ IF { MERGEFIELD a4 } <> "" " { MERGEFIELD a4}
" ""}{ IF { MERGEFIELD postcode } <> "" " { MERGEFIELD postcode}
} " ""}

where, as you probably guessed, surname initials a1..a4 postcode are
the column headings in the Excel spreadsheet full of names and
addresses. The basic trick is to test if there is anything in the next
excel column, and sneak off to the next IF if not. The line endings are
only output if there had been something to say.

It has worked really well for me. I can afford to be as slack as can be
about smearing someone's name and address all over the spreadsheet
columns.

When doing mailers, I populate extra columns in excel so the data merge
query options can be used to select the recipients. e.g If
gullible_sucker is equal to "y" (only joking, honest!)

You might need to debug this, I might have missed the odd space and }
as I excerpted it from my own letterhead template which is even more
baroque than the above. The line endings and spaces are pretty
critical. Not for the faint-hearted, but it has worked for me ever
since Word v 5.1 which had a much cleaner field facility than the
current pile of bloat. I remember fighting tooth and nail with the
'wizards' that wanted to 'help' me when I moved it to Word X. I
honestly can't remember how I forced it in there in the end. I think I
had to type it all in again after somehow tricking the 'wizard' into
showing me its version of the mergefield structure. Option-f9 is a
useful keystroke sequence. It toggles between field commands and their
output. If this is all a mystery, curl up with the help system and ask
it about fields. Expect to be gone for some time.

Why oh why does MS call those things 'wizards'. To the best of my
knowledge, most Americans do not admit to understanding the meaning of
irony.

If it were me, I'd call them sorcerer's apprentices and play, as a
warning, Dukas' music any time one of them has focus.

Hat der alte Hexenmeister
Sich doch einmal wegbegeben!
Und nun sollen seine Geister
Auch nach meinem Willen leben.
Seine Wort und Werke
Merkt ich und den Brauch,
Und mit Geistesstärke
Tu ich Wunder auch.

(That's for Clive. We gotta keep our literary allusions flying)

This can be done with a simple text editor such as MPW or BBEdit, OS
9.__ or earlier (not sure what there is in OS 10._.) :

- copy the cells from Excel and paste into, eg. MPW. The fields will be
separated by TAB characters.
- where there is a blank field, there will be 2 sequential TAB's. These
can be more easilly seen by turning "Show invisibles" on. Copy the 2
sequential TAB's.
- under Find/Replace, paste the 2 TAB's into the find string. Set the
replace string to1 TAB.
- put cursor at top of window
- Hit "Replace All". All occurances of 2 sequential TAB's will be
replaced with 1 tab and thus one blank field / row will be removed.
- repeat previous 2 steps until all double TAB's are removed
- copy and paste the fixed test into Word. All fields will be separated
with TAB's.
- or if the text is to be in a table,  copy and paste the fixed test
into a Word table of size maximum number of columns and maximum number
of rows of the text.

Or the multiple tabs can be removed with a simple Fortran program.

On 10/26/05 4:36 AM, in article BF8528C2.4506%info@octane.uk.net, "wayne
smallman" <info@octane.uk.net> wrote:

Hey Wayne,

Word by default will not include blank merge fields. If an entire line is
blank then Word Data Merge will remove the entire line.

Check your XL sheet to make sure you accidentally don't have "spaces" in
the blank fields. If any of these fields in XL have white space, then Word
will include the line.

Matt
MacWord Testing
Microsoft