Hullo, I'm wondering whether someone could help me, please ?  I've been
asked to help a charity working on some new computers. Although I'm more
than happy with the majority of Office, I have never had any occasion to use
Mailmerge and the majority of instructions, such as those in Help or the
Microsoft site, only seem to deal with the straight forward set-ups.

The charity works to gain sponsors for children in 3rd World areas and
writes to these sponsors periodically to keep them uptodate. The source data
document is an Excel document. Entering mailmerge fields to fill address and
salutation details are not a problem but the problems arise with inserting
the names of the children because some sponsors support as many as three
children.

"A typical sentence might run: I'm delighted to enclose a photo of
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx which we received a week ago."
In place of the xxxxxxxxxxx would be the mailmerge fields:
?Childs_first_names_1? ?Childs_first_names_2? ?Childs_first_names_3?

I have managed to sort out what to do if I want to insert 'and' or a comma
between the children's name ( though not how to do , between the first two
and 'and' between the second two, if there are indeed 3 children; or 'and'
between children 1 and 2 if there is no third child). However, I cannot get
rid of the space left after the first or second child's name if the next
field is blank.

I tried:

{MERGEFIELD "Childs_first_names_1"}{ If {MERGEFIELD Childs_first_names_2}<>
"" "," "" }{MERGEFIELD "Childs_first_names_2" }{If {MERGEFIELD
Childs_first_names_3}<> "" "and" "" }{MERGEFIELD "Childs_first_names_3"}

but is still leaves a small gap.

I've also investigated switches but without any degree of satisfaction.

Any help would be very much appreciated please as at the moment I'm spending
a lot of time on it and remaining stumped!  The more straightforward the
answer, the better!

Thanks in anticipation.

Kate

P.S. I've tried looking through past posts but none seem exactly relevant.