Thanks for your responses to my questions Paul, but I'm still unclear on how to achieve what I'm trying to do...

Re: the justification question- Do I need to insert braces and then use Word's insert tabs dialog to insert the tab stop and tab? What value would I put in the Tab Stop position? That's what I tried and got partial results but two of the currency fields were pushed further to the right, perhaps because the month abbreviations for 'Mar' and 'May' take up slightly more space than 'Feb'?



Re: inserting a Totals line - I just need totals for one group (Amounts) per key. I inserted immediately after the {Set Key) statement in the first line of code. Then, I output Tot1 just after .

Further down, where I output date and amount records, I inserted , which if I understand correctly is where each amount is being summed into Tot1. However, the Total shows as 0. :{

My understanding of the syntax is still rudimentary and I think I must be missing something. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

No extra field braces are required. You need only insert the tab stops in the positions where you want the alignment to occur, just as you would in an ordinary document. Don't be concerned with whether they mergefields align correctly, as they're quite possibly going to be wider than the actual data.
For your purposes, you could use the two {SET Tot1 0} fields, the {SET Tot1 {=Tot1+{MERGEFIELD Sales}}} field (all in red), plus the {=Tot1 \# $,0} field (with or without the table, depending on what you're doing table-wise). Note that, because you now have two fields for the true condition in the initial IF test, they need to be wrapped in double-quotes, thus:
{IF{MERGESEQ}= 1 "{SET Key ""}{SET Tot1 0}" {SET LastKey {REF Key}}}
In the attachment, which is based directly on the tutorial, I've implemented the totals for a merge using a single key - using 'Total' instead of 'Tot1'. If you simply connect it to your copy of the tutorial's datasource file, you should be able to generate the merge.

Attached Files

Mailmerge Main Document.doc (33.5 KB, 35 views)

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

I wasn't able to make my document give me totals correctly (kept getting a calculation error that would continue through my (small) recordset) - so I started again with your attachment and gradually introduced my own field names and structure and that worked like a charm. Thanks!

But, I don't have much confidence that I can make changes w/o 'breaking' it. For example, what determines when one needs to wrap code with double quotes? Is there any documentation you could refer me to so I can understand the syntax better? I assume that the opening and closing braces
have to be paired, but with nesting it quickly becomes difficult to tell if you're missing a brace. Any thoughts?

Thanks again for your help.