Hello all -

This will be my first real dive into Word development, so I apologize for my
ignorance.  That having been said, here is the situation I find myself in.

Using Acess and SQL 2000 we are able to export data into a comma-delimited
text file and import this into a word template using book marks.  So far,
the templates we use are about 1-2 pages and they are VERY static.  However,
now we want to become a little more dynamic and we're not sure how to go
about it.

For instance, before we use to just list list totals in our reports:

Total Clients: 10
Today's date: 2002-10-08
etc...

Now we'd like to create a template that could be repeated X number of times.
For instance:

(Page1)
Client name: ClientA
Employee total: 40
etc...
(Page2)
Client name: ClientB
Employee total: 50
etc...

So, when developing the template we won't know how many clients there will
be ... but, we'd want each page uniform and the same.

Would we want to use a Mail-merge for this, instead of bookmarks?  Would
that allow us to have X number of pages, all of the same template, but
displaying different data?

Any and all suggestions are appreciated!!

Thanks,
  Wade

Hi Wade,

I'd say yes, based on exactly what you've shown me.

You can test this fairly easily in the Word UI (for any follow-up, please
tell us which version of Word you're working with). Choose the "form
letters" mail merge type (intead of labels or envelopes) and each record
will automatically generate a new page.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister
http://www.mvps.org/word
http://go.compuserve.com/MSOfficeForum

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Hi Cindy -

I appreciate the response.  But, I'm hoping for a few suggestions as to
where to find out how to do this.

For instance, do you know of any white papers that deal with this?
Tutorials?  Good websites?  Anything that can help me learn to do a mail
merge on a comma-delimited text file.

And we're running both Word 2000 and Word XP - sorry for not mentioning this
before.

Thanks,
   Wade

There is tons of mail merge info on the Word MVP web site at
http://www.mvps.org/word/

This particular article might be a good starting point:
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MailMerge/CreateADataSource.htm

I'd look there first, and if you still have questions, post again.
HTH, Lisa

Hi Wade,

Well, the place to start is Word's Help, and then the information on
mvps.org/word, as Lisa says. It's certainly not difficult to set up a merge to
a comma-delimited text file - in principle, anyway.

There are definitely some "gotchas" with text files, depending on how they're
set up. Do you control how they're generated, or are you letting Access use
it's built-in functionality? If the latter, you might find you get more
predictable and consistent results if you have Access create the delimited
file in RTF format (the result is really no different, but Word opens and
interprets the content differently).

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister
http://www.mvps.org/word
http://go.compuserve.com/MSOfficeForum

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or
reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)