Can this be done with mail merge?

[amtrak23]

A user enters info into a word doc that has about 10 fill in fields on it. They then print it out, give it to the next person, who now enters about half of the above info, into another word doc that is setup as a merge doc. This person now prints out the doc and sends the letter.

Can we knock out the middle step and just take the info from the first form and input it directly into the data source sheet that the second form is reading off of?

 

[sawedoff]

Perhaps an easier task might be to set up an Access form which could then be used as the source info for the mail merge. Just build the Access database (table), then create an Access form using those data fields, and as the form is filled in, the entry is written into the table. Then any time you run Mail Merge, it will access the table.

Sawedoff

 

[amtrak23]

Thank you for the response. I was kind of thinking along those lines as well, but I'm not familar with merges and wasn't sure how it would work.

I'm not very familar with merges, so my question is how do you tell the main merge form to only pull out one specific row of data if it was in an access DB? It's not like we want 1000 forms letters being generated each time we run the merge. We just want one, so if there are 1000 rows of can you qeary the db via the merge form and pull up something from a UID?

 

[macropod]

Hi amtrak23,

You could also do this using Word's INCLUDETEXT field. The INCLUDETEXT field can be used to insert all or part of a 'source' document into a 'target' document. For your purposes, this would probably only be feasible if the same 'source' document was being updated with new information, rather than a new 'source' document being created each time.

Cheers

 

[sawedoff]

After designing the merge document, and opening the data source (your Access db) when you tell Word to merge, it will bring up a dialog box, and one of the options is a record filter. That should do it for you.

Sawedoff