Mac Forum / Applications / Word / October 2006

I never knew there was such a thing.
You *can* suppress missing address lines with creative use of IF in
your source doc.
Here's mine (sort of)
{ IF { MERGEFIELD surname } <> "" "{MERGEFIELD title }{
MERGEFIELD initials } {MERGEFIELD surname }
" ""}{IF {MERGEFIELD position} <> "" " {MERGEFIELD position}
" ""}{ 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
}" ""}

The trick is to place the paragraph marks inside the IFs so that Word
won't be tempted to insert one where it is not needed.

Note this was hand copied, so you might have to wrestle with it a bit
more than you ought if I made a typo.

Note also that it does not behave well if there is no surname (It adds
a space)

"Suppress Blank Lines in Addresses" is enabled by default in Word 2004 mail
merge documents, just as it is on Windows Word.

I don't see an obvious place in the Data Merge Manager to either disable it
or enable it. As it happens, there is no obvious place in the current
Windows Word dialog boxes to enable/disable this feature either - you have
to restore the old dialog boxes to do it.

However, you can enable/disable using VBA, using e.g.

Sub enableSuppressBlankLines()
 ActiveDocument.MailMerge.SuppressBlankLines = True
End Sub

to enable it and

Sub disableSuppressBlankLines()
 ActiveDocument.MailMerge.SuppressBlankLines = False
End Sub

to disable it. This feature also seems to be exposed in Word's Applescript
dictionary but I haven't tested it there.

All that said, to use blank line suppression successfully, you have to know
which "blank lines" Word actually suppresses (and if you really want to
delve deep, what Word thinks a "line" is). Roughly speaking, for a paragraph
to be suppressed
a.  it has to contain at least one "standalone MERGEFIELD"
b. every MERGEFIELD field has to evaluate to an empty result (i.e. they
cannot even evaluate to a space character, as it would if the data comes
from an Excel cell that contains a space). However, other fields such as IF
fields can evaluate to spaces.
c. the resulting paragraph can only contain certain types of white space,
e.g. spaces and tabs, but not hard spaces (ctrl-shift-spacebar), which will
prevent suppression.

I certainly don't know all of the rules, but for example

<paragraphmark>

won't be suppressed.

<tab><paragraphmark>

won't be suppressed.

{ MERGEFIELD abc }<paragraphmark>

will be suppressed if { MERGEFIELD abc } is empty, but not if it evaluates
to <space>

{ IF "{MERGEFIELD abc }" = "" "" "{MERGEFIELD abc }" }<paragraphmark>

will not be suppressed even when { MERGEFIELD abc } is empty

{ IF "{MERGEFIELD abc }" = "" "" "{MERGEFIELD abc }" }{ MERGEFIELD
abc }<paragraphmark>

will be suppressed if { MERGEFIELD abc } is empty, but not if it evaluates
to <space>

and so on...

Also, in Word 2004 and some recent versions of Windows Word, blank lines are
never suppressed if they are generated as a result of another field such as
IF or INCLUDETEXT.

Because you get complete control using the kind of IF field construction
John McGhie and others pointed you to, there's a case for switching off
blank suppression unless you know it does exactly what you need.

Peter Jamieson