I am having a problem with Word that I cannot solve. I
have an 8.5x14 sheet on which I have printed a long
letter with about 20 merge fields across 4 paragraphs.
It is working nicely and my customer prints about 12 to
50 of these per day. The problem comes about when
attempting to insert a pie chart at the bottom of the
letter that varies based on data within the merge. For
example, each customer has 4 amounts in each record. A
stock-invested amount, a bond-invested amount, an other-
invested amount and a total-invested amount. What I need
to do is have each page of the merge have a unique pie
chart with slices representing the stock, bond, and other
amounts as a percentage of the total amount. The customer
HAS to print this at his office and all he has is Word
and Excel. Right now, he is inserting a unique chart
onto each letter manually after the merge has been
completed. This works for 12 letters, but is a real pain
when the end of the month 500 letters comes along.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
Mark.
You can also email me at mfreeze@mailent.com
Hi Mark,
I've discussed this numerous times in this newsgroup over
the last couple of years. A search on Google.com should turn
up a few of these exchanges. To summarize, very briefly:
1. Word can't make the charts as part of the mail merge.
2. The charts can be created in Excel, or in Word, but they
must be done "by hand" (or with the help of a macro)
3. The easiest way, if the customer doesn't want to pay for
a VBA solution, would be to set up a linked MS Graph to a
table of data in the letter. This merge can NOT be executed,
it must be printed out from the main merge doc, page-by-page
/ record-by-record. This way, the table of data and the
chart can update relative to one another (if the user is
lucky, that is).
> I am having a problem with Word that I cannot solve. I
> have an 8.5x14 sheet on which I have printed a long
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> completed. This works for 12 letters, but is a real pain
> when the end of the month 500 letters comes along.
Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep
30 2003)
http://www.word.mvps.org
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