Need advice on category sorted e-mail merge

[GeoB]

I've reviewed the MS article on doing a category sorted merge and, after several hours, have not solved the problem of getting multiple records for each unique key. Attached is my main document and some sample data (from Office 2010). I'd greatly appreciate some pointers on how best to modify the main document. (I'm hoping the intended result is evident from the main doc.)

Here are the three e-mails generated in my test environment, using the main document as most recently posted. I'd removed an unnecessary "=" and a redundant mergefield block.

1:
Albert,

We recently sent an e-mail, telling you about volunteer opportunities Bogusville Inc has listed at Mr. Physics that will expire at the end of the month. Expired listings cease to appear on the website. If you would like these opportunities to remain active, please contact us at your earliest convenience.


Opportunity: Relativity
Phone: 111.555.1212
Expiration: 9/30/2011


2:
Richard,

We recently sent an e-mail, telling you about volunteer opportunities Alternate Universe Corp. has listed at Mr. Physics that will expire at the end of the month. Expired listings cease to appear on the website. If you would like these opportunities to remain active, please contact us at your earliest convenience.


Richard,

We recently sent an e-mail, telling you about volunteer opportunities Alternate Universe Corp. has listed at Mr. Physics that will expire at the end of the month. Expired listings cease to appear on the website. If you would like these opportunities to remain active, please contact us at your earliest convenience.

Opportunity: Quantum Electrodynamics


Phone: 111.555.2121
Expiration: 9/30/2011

3:
Richard,

We recently sent an e-mail, telling you about volunteer opportunities Alternate Universe Corp. has listed at Mr. Physics that will expire at the end of the month. Expired listings cease to appear on the website. If you would like these opportunities to remain active, please contact us at your earliest convenience.


Opportunity: Quark Soup
Phone: 111.555.2121
Expiration: 9/30/2011

I've reached the conclusion "you can't get there from here". It appears that sending e-mails from a Word merge causes every record to have MERGESEQ = 1 and every record to generate an e-mail.

Unless someone has a clever work-around in Word merge codes, I'll have to write some VBA code at the originating database (with tables linked to an online db) to create a new table with a field containing text from the multiple records for each organization.

Thanks for listening!

George

[macropod]

Hi George,

You can use Word's Catalogue/Directory Mailmerge facility for this (the terminology depends on the Word version), but it isn't at all straightforward. To see how to do so with any mailmerge data source supported by Word, check out my Microsoft Word Catalogue/Directory Mailmerge Tutorial at:
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/sho...ngs-(2000-2010)
or
http://www.gmayor.com/Zips/Catalogue%20Mailmerge.zip
Do read the tutorial before trying to use the mailmerge document included with it.

[GeoB]

Thanks for the reply.

I had reviewed the tutorial as part of my effort. It's relevance was lost on me in that I needed to create e-mail messages not a directory (I'm working in Office 2010) and that the data source is not readily manipulated. Have you been successful in generating single e-mails containing data from multiple records using your techniques?

Since my last post I've developed VBA code in Access to create a local table that contains a single record with data from multiple records in a linked table, using criteria specified in a Word userform. A test merge to e-mail showed that this table meets current requirements. (I have far greater experience with VBA than Word mergefields.) All that's left is to write the code to drive the merge.

g

[macropod]

Hi George,

The e-mail directory merge described in my tutorial is actually a two-stage process:
1. merge the records to a table in which all of each group's records end up in a single row (with possible multiple paragraphs - 1 per record - in a given cell)
2. merge from the table to email in the normal manner.
Once you've done the required basic setup, the macro handles the rest.