Programmatically Insert Data into Merged Document

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Jeffrey Brown - 30 Sep 2003 21:00 GMT

I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to
insert information outside the source or data files into a
merged document. I am working with Word 2K in Windows 2K.
All I want to do is insert custom date fields.

As the source and data files are connected to third party
software that inserts database information onto the form,
I cannot add to the merge record directly. I've tried
nesting, I've tried includetext...I added bookmarks to the
source document, nothing translates over onto the merge
document, instead it stays on the source.

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Peter Jamieson - 01 Oct 2003 09:07 GMT

OK, I hope you saw my other response, but if you want to retain the {
CREATEDATE } /as a CREATEDATE field/ then I am pretty sure that there is no
way of doing so. However, if you put a { CREATEDATE } in a .dot rather than
a .doc, and INCLUDETEXT it, the INCLUDETEXT will be retained and when
executed will show the creation date of the including file (whereas a
createdate in a .doc will show the creation date of the included file). So
maybe that is a route you can live with (personally, I might be concerned
about sharing the same included file with lots of other merge output files,
but maybe that is not a problem.

I think the only other option is to leave a placemarker in your mail merge
main document and postprocess the merge output to insert the required
fields. If you go down that route you will probably end up controlling the
merge process itself in code as there is no other way to guarantee that the
substitutions will be made.

--
Peter Jamieson
MS Word MVP

> I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to
> insert information outside the source or data files into a
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> source document, nothing translates over onto the merge
> document, instead it stays on the source.

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Robert - 03 Oct 2003 23:21 GMT

Regarding your suggestion about "controlling the merge process itself
in code", I have been unable to find any examples of how to do this
(at least none in the way I would like to do it).

My question is: is it possible to take a data source such as a
recordset and to programatically insert it into precreated merge
fields, move to the next record, repeat, etc.?

I know how to insert data from a recordset into a bookmark but not how
to move to the next record, add a new page and do it again the way a
mailmerge does it.

Any sample code or references would be very helpful to me in a current
problem I'm working on.

Robert

>I think the only other option is to leave a placemarker in your mail merge
>main document and postprocess the merge output to insert the required
>fields. If you go down that route you will probably end up controlling the
>merge process itself in code as there is no other way to guarantee that the
>substitutions will be made.

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Cindy Meister -WordMVP- - 04 Oct 2003 16:04 GMT

Hi Robert,

> My question is: is it possible to take a data source such as a
> recordset and to programatically insert it into precreated merge
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> to move to the next record, add a new page and do it again the way a
> mailmerge does it.

WdAcc97.zip in the Special Merges section of my website does demonstrate
how to do the latter part. For incrementing within the same file, I'd
use Insert/File with the template or document file. Or create an
AutoText entry and repeatedly insert that.

However, I'd never choose to use merge fields as data "targets".

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jan 24 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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