This is a somewhat involved mail merge question. I'm printing out address labels for Christmas cards, and I'd like to address different families of different sizes personally. The easy way out, which I'm tempted to do at the moment, is "The <<last name>> family," as in "The Peterson family." But I'm addressing cards to families of all different sizes:

- single people
- single people with kids


- married people without kids
- married people with kids

Single people are easy. Married people without kids are easy too, once I figured out the "if ... then" trick. Where it gets tricky is that some of my married friends kept their maiden names. Right now when I use the "if ... then" trick with maiden names, it's trying to print out "Tim and Jenny Smith Peterson," as opposed to what I want: "Tim Peterson and Jenny Smith."

And then how about kids' names? Is this even possible? MS Word doesn't seem to recognize this field - can I create it? I'd love to have the first line read "Tim, Jenny, Tommy, and Charlie Peterson." Assuming I can get it to recognize the "child" field, how do I work it with the commas and the last "and?" It seems like this would be involved, but possible.

I'd appreciate any help you all could give me on this matter. I'm a mail merge rookie, though, so the more dumbed-down the explanation, the better.

Wouldn't that be Tim Peterson, Jenny Smith, Tommy Peterson-Smith and Charlie Peterson-Smith?

Just kidding, but my point is that there are so many variables that a catch all solution may not be possible.

For the couples part, this might work:


{ MERGEFIELD First_Name } { IF { MERGEFIELD Spouse_First_Name } = "" "{ MERGEFIELD Last_Name }""{ IF { MERGEFIELD Spouse_Last_Name } = "" "and { MERGEFIELD Spouse_First_Name } { MERGEFIELD Last_Name }""{ MERGEFIELD Last_Name } and { MERGEFIELD Spouse_First_Name } { MERGEFIELD Spouse_Last_Name }" }" }

__________________
Greg Maxey
Please visit my web site at http://www.gregmaxey.com/

In a similar vein, the following construction can be used to manage data where one or more related fields (A, B, C, D, E, & F) may or may not be populated.
{MERGEFIELD A}{IF{MERGEFIELD C}= " " " and {MERGEFIELD B}" ", {MERGEFIELD B}{IF{MERGEFIELD D}= " " " and {MERGEFIELD C}" ", {MERGEFIELD C}{IF{MERGEFIELD E}= " " " and {MERGEFIELD D}" ", {MERGEFIELD D}{IF{MERGEFIELD F}= " " " and {MERGEFIELD E}" ", {MERGEFIELD E} and {MERGEFIELD F}"}"}"}"}

Note 1: It is assumed that none of the fields after the first empty one will be populated.

Note 2: The field brace pairs (ie '{ }') for the above example are created in the body of the document via Ctrl-F9 (Cmd-F9 on a Mac) - you can't simply type them or copy & paste them from this message.

Note 3: A macro to convert the above constructions to working fields is available at: http://www.gmayor.com/export_field.htm#TextToField

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