Creating a Form with Fields that will Populate into Another Document

[Mobius]

I use multi-page contracts that contain a large amount of boilerplate text. However, there are places where names, addresses, reference numbers, etc. need to be inserted. Is there a way where I can create a "form" with all of the input data, then with some mail merge-style facility have my contract automatically populate with all of the appropriate data? I am sure there is a tutorial out there, but I just don't know how to articulate my question appropriately.

[gmayor]

What you need is a VBA userform. This is not exactly the easiest thing to begin an interest in VBA programming with, however - For the basics, see http://www.gmayor.com/Userform.htm and http://www.gmayor.com/Userform_ComboBox.html

[macropod]

An alternative would be use an actual mailmerge with and Excel data source, having standard column header names that the various output documents, configured as mailmerge main documents, can reference. If you store the data in the Excel workbook as permanent records, that would allow you to process multiple records at a time and gives you boilerplate text you can copy to new rows.

[Charles Kenyon]

Originally Posted by Mobius

I use multi-page contracts that contain a large amount of boilerplate text. However, there are places where names, addresses, reference numbers, etc. need to be inserted. Is there a way where I can create a "form" with all of the input data, then with some mail merge-style facility have my contract automatically populate with all of the appropriate data? I am sure there is a tutorial out there, but I just don't know how to articulate my question appropriately.

I do use Mail Merge for this. Essentially it is a DIY case management system. I keep the data for many (similar) cases in an Excel spreadsheet. I use that as the data source. I merge standard documents with a single case record to form a draft document for filing with the court. In many, but not all, situations, the draft is the final document. In others it is fine-tuned to the situation.

I do not, but probably should, use a UserForm in Excel to populate the data rows.