Mail merge gender specific salutation

[Mirella]

Hi All,

I was wondering if you can create a gender specific salutation?

We are using CRM 4.0 to do a mailmerge and on of the columns contains the
gender of the contact. Is it possible in a mail merge to set the salutation
based on the gender?

If so, how can this be done?

Thx in advance.

KR,
Mirella

 

[Graham Mayor]

Yes and no. Male gender is easy to deal with {IF {Mergefield Gender} = "M"
then "Dear Sir" }
Female gender is somewhat more complex as the title could be Madam, Miss or
Ms, with no doubt other options in different languages. You cannot tell
which is appropriate from gender alone. Some fudge it by using Dear
Sir/Madam or use instead the forename Dear John or Dear Jane - or worse the
forename and the surname Dear John Smith

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Peter Jamieson]

Assuming that CRM 4 uses a traditional Mail Merge main document as its
starting point, you can insert an IF field at the appropriate point in
the mail merge main document. A really simple example would be:

Dear { IF "{ MERGEFIELD genderfield }" = "F" "Madam" "Sir" }

where
a. each pair of {} are the special "field code braces" that you can
insert using ctrl-F9
b. you use the appropriate merge field instead of "genderfield"
c. you do the appropriate comparison, e.g. if you field stores numeric
0 or 1, you might need something like

Dear { IF { MERGEFIELD genderfield } = 0 "Sir" "Madam" }

d. you output the appropriate texts instead of Sir/Madam. And if it
isn't something really simple like Sir/Madam, that's likely to be the
trickiest part, which is why it is always worth considering storing one
or more salutations in your data. e.g. for some letters you may need
"Dear Sir", others you may need "Dear Mr"/"Mrs"/etc, and in some cases
you may know some people well enough to use "Dear Les", or even "Les:".
There may be a good reason to store the entire salutation (e.g. what if
you are doing multilingual output)

If you have more than 2 possible values in your gender field, e.g.
M/F/Unknown, you could use

Dear { IF "{ MERGEFIELD genderfield }" = "F" "Madam" "{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD
genderfield }" = "M" "Sir" "Sir/Madam" }

Alternatively (in either scenario), you could do something like this:
Dear { SET greetingM "Sir" }{ SET greetingF "Madam" }{ SET greetingU
"Sir/Madam" }{ REF "greeting{ MERGEFIELD genderfield }" }


Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk