How to limit the number of characters in a mail merge field

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pschatz100 - 03 Jan 2006 19:11 GMT

I use mail merge from a database to print mailing labels. I would like to
limit the number of characters that will be entered into a field so as not to
mess up my label formatting. For example, I want no more than 20 characters
in the field for company name on my labels.

I am willing to simply truncate the data to the first 20 characters. No
fancy logic required. Thanks.

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Doug Robbins - Word MVP - 03 Jan 2006 19:17 GMT

The best place to manipulate the data is in the database. There is no way
to do it as part of the mailmerge process.

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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

>I use mail merge from a database to print mailing labels. I would like to
> limit the number of characters that will be entered into a field so as not
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> I am willing to simply truncate the data to the first 20 characters. No
> fancy logic required. Thanks.

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TedMi - 03 Jan 2006 19:28 GMT

Not sure how to do this in Word, but it can be done if you use an Access
report instead of a Word mail-merge doc. Just make the text boxes the size
you want, and any excess length will be truncated. An advantage of this
method is that it limits not the number of characters, but the physical
length of the field - which is what you need to control to avoid messing up
your formatting. With proportional fonts, the number of characters that fit
in a physical space depends on the widths of the characters.

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Ted

> I use mail merge from a database to print mailing labels. I would like to
> limit the number of characters that will be entered into a field so as not to
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> I am willing to simply truncate the data to the first 20 characters. No
> fancy logic required. Thanks.

Reply to this Message