Hi Samantha,

When you say "It is a mail merge, but not from a microsoft product", does Word do the mailmerge, or are you just getting a document generated by your application that Word can open? It makes a huge difference.

Assuming Word is doing the mailmerge, you're probably using either a letter merge or a Directory/Catalog merge.

With a letter mailmerge, what ordinarily happens is that you get a document with one page per record, with 'Next Page' Section breaks separating the pages. To list all the records for each student sequentially, they'd need to be sorted or a sort applied as part of the mailmerge process. A Directory/Catalog merge, on the other hand, can output page breaks between the records. In either case, if you want to insert a number of blank pages between the sets of records for each student, there are two problems that have to be addressed:


1. Identifying when the students change (eg different student IDs); and
2. Calculating how many blank pages to insert. With a mailmerge, you can't do that using IF fields at all, since IF fields get converted to their results at the time of the merge - which is liable to mean either no output or the same potentially wrong output from them at all. Furthermore, if you're using a letter merge, the page count returned by the field code will typically be '1', since whatever Section the field is in is liable to have only 1 page ...
I know how to deal with both issues, but I'd need to know just how your merge is being done before getting into those issues.

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