How do I get Word 2003 to preserve blank lines in a mail merge

[Guest]

Hello,

Here is the problem I am having with Mail Merge and Word 2003:

Office 97 provides a place for you to say if you want to "Print blank lines"
for a mail merge document. For instance, if the data file looked like this:

m1}m2}m3
Jason}M}Proos
}}}
John}A}Abrams

(as in a plain ASCII text file; which is precisely what I have to use in an
automated mail merge process)

Further suppose that the merge document contained 3 lines of merge fields
m1, m2, m3 like this:

<m1> <m2> <m3> <next record>
<m1> <m2> <m3> <next record>
<m1> <m2> <m3> <next record>

Word 97 coud be easily configured to display this:

Jason M Proos

John A Abrams

In Word 2003, I can't get it to display the blank line when all the fields
are empty. Word 2003 displays this instead:

Jason M Proos
John A Abrams

Please don't suggest manually inserting a blank line between the appropriate
rows of merge fields in the merge document. For reasons not relevant to this
question this is not an option. Basically, we can't count on subsequent
pages of the merged document needing to have the blank line in the same place.

Obviously, we have just upgraded from Word 97 and are trying to figure out
how to get this feature of Word 97 to work in Word 2003.

Thank you for your help.

Jason Proos

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?anByb29z?=,

Here is the problem I am having with Mail Merge and Word 2003:

Office 97 provides a place for you to say if you want to "Print blank lines"
for a mail merge document.

By default, this is "on" in Word 2002 and later. You can get to the dialog box
by picking up the old command out of Tools/Customize/Commands. I've got a table
of these in the Word 2002 section of my website's mail merge FAQ.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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