Blank lines in Mail Merge addresses

Blank lines in Mail Merge addresses - How do I correct?

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wissahicc - 10 Nov 2004 01:02 GMT

I am creating a large mail merge (860 addresses) for mailing labels. Approx.
200 of the addresses have a blank line between the last line of the street
address and the city, state, zip. Most of these addresses are business
addresses (4-5 lines total). I believe I inserted the merge fields correctly
since most of the labels printed correctly. The am using contacts from
Microsoft Outlook 2003 as the data source. If I print the contact list
directly from Outlook (as a phone book) they print out correctly with no
additional blank line. I am using Microsoft Word 2003. Any help you could
offer me would be greatly appreciated.

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Cindy M -WordMVP- - 10 Nov 2004 20:33 GMT

Hi =?Utf-8?B?d2lzc2FoaWNj?=,

As a general rule, Word 2003 should suppress blank lines by default. But if a
line contains ANYTHING besides a MergeField, it won't. In this case, you need to
use IF fields to check whether something is "blank" and suppress lines within
the fields. It could look something like this:

{ IF { Mergefield Address2 } <> "" "{Mergefield Address2}¶
" "" }{ IF { Mergefield Address3 } <> "" "{Mergefield Address3}¶
" "" }

The ¶ stands for a paragraph mark (where you press ENTER). Note that this must
be part of the IF field in order to suppress the blank line if the comparison
evaluates to false.

> I am creating a large mail merge (860 addresses) for mailing labels. Approx.
> 200 of the addresses have a blank line between the last line of the street
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> directly from Outlook (as a phone book) they print out correctly with no
> additional blank line. I am using Microsoft Word 2003.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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