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Old 03-06-2017, 02:34 PM
bbrennan bbrennan is offline Empty field suppression Windows 8 Empty field suppression Office 2016
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Hello, I am running into a problem suppressing a space that is appearing when I do a mail merge. I am using the Raiser's Edge Database's Mail function. Unfortunately, the people at Blackbaud told me they cannot help me, as the problem is in word, not the database.

I work for a school, and when we send messages to people, we include their P Years if they are parents.

This image http://tinypic.com/r/20rpppl/9 shows that I am having the database pull the field if it exists and pull the constituent's ID if it doesn't. After that, I am creating this If...Then...Else function:

IF Acknowledgee_Additional_Addressee = Acknowledgee_Constituent_ID "" Acknowledgee_Additional_Addressee

It worked great for when people had the P Year field, but when they didn't, it creates an additional space, which I can't have because sometimes these are used in the body of the letter.

I tried the following:
IF Acknowledgee_Additional_Addressee = Acknowledgee_Constituent_ID \b "" Acknowledgee_Additional_Addressee

It just left the letter b.

I am using Word 2016. Please let me know what I am doing wrong.

Thanks in advance!
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Old 03-06-2017, 05:42 PM
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macropod macropod is offline Empty field suppression Windows 7 64bit Empty field suppression Office 2010 32bit
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The \b switch is not used in an IF test - it is an alternative way of generating conditional output, which might also include suppressing an empty space or line. For your purposes, it appears you need an IF test constructed along the lines of:
{IF«Acknowledgee_Additional_Addressee» = «Acknowledgee_Constituent_ID» "" "«Acknowledgee_Additional_Addressee»¶
"}

Note: The field brace pairs (i.e. '{ }') for the above example are all created in the document itself, via Ctrl-F9 (Cmd-F9 on a Mac); you can't simply type them or copy & paste them from this message. Nor is it practical to add them via any of the standard Word dialogues. Likewise, you can't type or copy & paste the chevrons (i.e. '« »') - they're part of the actual mergefields, which you can insert from the 'Insert Merge Field' dropdown. The spaces represented in the field construction are all required. Instead of the ¶ symbol, you should use a real paragraph break and delete the one that follows the field code.
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