Mail Merge with forms

[Guest]

I am trying to create a proposal template using mail merge. I have the main
document set up with my merge fields. That works fine. After the merge is
completed there are fields that need to be filled in manually by a user.
What is the best way to do this?

Here is what I have done:

Used form fields to denote what needs to be filled in. The dropdowns work
great, however the text form field do not get carried over in the merge. I
had found an article in the Microsoft kbase about writing a macro to
accomplish this task. I did do this, however everytime I run it I get
inconsistent results. This wasn't good for future development of this
proposal doc.

So another idea was to use the highlighter to highlight the portion of text
that needs to be entered manually. This was an ok solution, the only
drawback was you needed to delete extra spaces after you were done. I am
trying to make this as user friendly as possible. Our old template just had
underlines for the data input and people would need to delete the line before
entering there data.

Does anyone have any other suggestions on how I could complete this task?

Thanks!

-Matt

 

[Doug Robbins]

On the assumption that you are only creating one proposal at a time, I would
have a userform with a combo or listbox display the data from your
datasource and the user would select the record that they want to "merge"
and then click on a command button on the userform that had the necessary
code behind it to populate bookmarks in the document with the relevant
information from the selected record.

See the article "How to create a Userform" at:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Userforms/CreateAUserForm.htm


--
Please respond to the Newsgroup for the benefit of others who may be
interested. Questions sent directly to me will only be answered on a paid
consulting basis.

Hope this helps,
Doug Robbins - Word MVP