I'm guessing this is probably in one of the guides somewhere, but after two days of tearing my hair our and getting almost everything else to work, I've gotten to a point in my directory where I just need to get the Region to only show the first time it occurs.

My Merge looks like this

Screenshot 2018-02-26 14.26.58.png

and produces this:

Screenshot 2018-02-26 14.26.38.png

I want to eliminate the "North"s, "east"s and "West"s, except for the first occurrence of each. I worked with the Catalogue Mailmerge Tutorial quite a bit, and was never able to achieve that result.

Thanks for any help - this whole process has made me feel pretty dumb.

You might want to check out the Merge Records By Category Using Two Keys implementation in my Microsoft Word Catalogue/Directory Mailmerge Tutorial:
https://www.msofficeforums.com/word/...-tutorial.html
The tutorial covers everything from list creation to the insertion & calculation of values in multi-record tables in letters. Do read the tutorial before trying to use the mailmerge document included with it.

Since the tutorial document includes working field codes for all of its examples, most of the hard work has already been done for you - you should be able to do little more than copy/paste the relevant field codes into your own mailmerge main document, substitute/insert your own field names and adjust the formatting to get the results you desire.

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

I've spent a lot of time working from that tutorial and was getting the same output, with less formatting control than I've got now. I see something now that I will try again later with that, but even working with a directly copy/pasted code, mine did not produce results identical to what is in the tutorial, and one of the Keys was always repeated for every iteration.

One thing I have not been able to figure out in the tutorial for two keys is what specifically the "Quote" field does and is for?

Correctly implemented, you'd get:

North

Reggie Mantle
A971 etc.
B971, etc.
R971, etc.

Betty Cooper
C971, etc.
C971, etc.

East

Archie Andrews
D971, etc.
E971, etc.
A971, etc.

Jugghead Jones
F971, etc.
J971, etc.
A971, etc.

and so on, as demonstrated in the tutorial.

The encompassing QUOTE field merely ties the whole construction together, which makes it easier to copy/paste and ensures all the related fields update together.

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