Hi, wonder if anyone can help.

I have a mail merge that is bringing in data from a csv. All the data imports perfectly. To line things up, I created it in a 2 column x 1 row table. This also has the advantage that the row auto resizes to the height required to display all the grades that aa customer has, and not leave a big blank space.Specifically, it has metal grade in one column and metal price in the other.

Now, to group certain things together, for example metal turnings (there may be copper, steel and brass turnings) I want a line space to appear between those and the other grades. To do this I have tried using some IF functions and another data point (called Metal#x) for the mail merge to determine if it is meant to be blank (and therefore add a space to the line to stop it being deleted) or if it is the last piece of data and can be deleted, along with anything below.



The code I came up with is thus;

My data has the form

Metal1 Metal1Price Metal1x Metal2 Metal2Price Metal2x etc

The x column was designed so that I could put an x in that column if it was left blank for a reason (because I wanted to space it out) but if it was left blank because there was no other data (they may only have 1 metal grade, for example) there would be no x (cell would be blank).

A picture might help demonstrate what I mean;



The numbers demonstrate which metal# it is. So in this case, Metal2x and Metal5x would have an x in and so a space should be inserted to stop the line being removed, but Metal7x through Metal15x would not and should therefore be removed.

But no matter what I try, I cant get it to remove anything below, in this example, metal6. If i look at the space formatting it has added a load of [ENTER]'s.

Anyone have any thoughts? I suspect its something obvious!

Hi Nibbles,

It would be helpful if you could attach a file to a post with some representative csv data and document showing the desired output format. You do this via the paperclip symbol on the 'Go Advanced' tab.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Paul, ive uploaded a small demo file that might explain it better.

Although the final file is much larger with much more data it has the same basic components.

Essentially, the boxes that are shaded green are what I want to retain, rather than the line being surpressed. To do this, i'd put an x in the metal#x box to tell it that that line isnt the last one and make an IF function that looks for that x in the line below. If it finds it it would add a space to stop the line being surpressed but if not would surpress it as normal. That way, the overall size of the table would only be for the number of entries actually required.

Hope that helps!

Steve

Attached Files

demo.xlsx (9.7 KB, 8 views)

You should be able to handle those scenarios easily enough with field coding like:
{IF{MERGEFIELD Metal3x} = "x" "¶
"}
where the ¶ is a paragraph break or manual line break.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Aha, thats done it, thanks. Knew it would be something simple!

For reference, I ended up with the code;

And it works perfectly