Can you remove words from a mergefield using field codes?

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ZeonAutonomy - 01 Nov 2006 14:28 GMT

We have a wrod document which we merge a field from our database too. The
database outputs "First name Middle name Surname" we would like our letters
to say "Dear Paul" rather than "Dear Paul Jon Humphries". I've been looking
for a merge field code which could be used to purely pull through the first
word, but have been unsucessful. Can anyone help/advise?

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Doug Robbins - Word MVP - 01 Nov 2006 19:33 GMT

You will have to separate the data in the data source to achieve what you
are after.

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Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

> We have a wrod document which we merge a field from our database too. The
> database outputs "First name Middle name Surname" we would like our
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> first
> word, but have been unsucessful. Can anyone help/advise?

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Cindy M. - 01 Nov 2006 20:05 GMT

Hi =?Utf-8?B?WmVvbkF1dG9ub215?=,

> We have a wrod document which we merge a field from our database too. The
> database outputs "First name Middle name Surname" we would like our letters
> to say "Dear Paul" rather than "Dear Paul Jon Humphries". I've been looking
> for a merge field code which could be used to purely pull through the first
> word, but have been unsucessful. Can anyone help/advise?

Word doesn't provide any facility for manipulating text. It's not possible to
pull out a single word, or a number of characters, or anything of that nature.

The best thing to do would be to redesign the database.

The other possibility - if the database supports it (unfortunately you don't
mention what kind of database this is) - would be to run a query in the
database that pre-processes the information before passing it to Word.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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