How do I omit blank space in a document created with a template?

[Guest]

I'm pulling data from Excel for a high school student/family directory. Not
all families have data in all merge fields, and the document is full of blank
space when there is no date.
How do I get the template to recognize that it should not leave this blank
space in the document?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Use a conditional merge field: IF. There also are SKIPIF and NEXTIF merge
fields that might be useful to you, depending on exactly what you're doing.

 

[Guest]

That sounds promising, but how do I find them, ie. what menu are they on? Do
I have to tell Word this when I select the merge field? How do I complete
the condition? I guess it's {if{mergefield} then???

 

[Guest]

I forgot to tell you, Herb, the merge fields are in a table, so the more
accurate question may be "is it possible to tell a table that, if the lines
are blank, not to leave room for them, i.e. to pull the bottom edge of the
table up to just below the last row with data in it?

Thanks very much!

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

That complicates matters.

To answer your other question, the conditional fields can be found (among
other places) on the Mail Merge toolbar -- look for the Insert Word Field
tool.

Would you be skipping records, or would you be suppressing fields? The
SKIPIF and NEXTIF are both geared to skipping a record if certain criteria
are met (such as a field being blank). The IF field can be used to
selectively skip particular fields (or other text) if certain criteria are
met.

Is this what you're doing: Row 1 might contain two fields from a data
record, row 2 might contain additional fields from the same data record,
etc.? And if any given row's fields are all empty, you'd want to suppress
that row? I'm not sure that would work. Because the "include this text if
field=true" text is enclosed in quotes, and has to be inside field braces, I
don't think so. I don't know of any way to have an IF field begin in one
table cell and end in another.

A lot depends on exactly what you're doing. You might need to make it a faux
table to get it to work. Rather than an actual table, you might have text
that's formatted with borders so it *looks* like it's part of the table, but
isn't really. That way, it could be enclosed inside the IF field's quotes.
It strikes me as complicated to set up, but I might be overcomplicating
matters, not having seen exactly what you're trying to do.

 

[Guest]

You are being so helpful, I really appreciate it! I'm amazed at how big the
Word world is...I seem to have tunnel vision for my little project.
The data is in Excel in columns.
In Word, I have a table and am using "merge fields" to select columns from
the Excel data.
The columns are: student's name, parents' names, street address, city, phone
number, email, and a few more.
Not all of the families have data in all of those columns. Everything is
working fine except there is blank space on the page. For example, if a
family doesn't want its address published, but only its names and phone
numbers, it looks like this:

STudent Jones
Mr & Mrs Jones


(503) 238-1111
As opposed to:
Nancy Church
xxxx SE Ash St
Portland OR
(503) 238-1111

I suspect that would be called suppressing fields, but i'm not sure.
Would I be better off skipping the Word approach and just using Excel? If so,
where do I start?

Thank you so much!