BleepingComputer.com: Merging Data From Excel Into Word (2003 Or 2007)

Let's say I have data contained in Excel with each piece of data in an adjacent cell...

Name: Rank: SSN#:
Smith, John R SSG 123-456-7890

How would I take that information and merge it into a memorandum in Office, all in separate documents?

So say the memorandum looks like this:


Whomever it may concern,

Smith, John R., SSG, United States Army, 123-456-7890 has been certified blah blah blah blah

Sincerely,
Me

So if I had 50 names it would produce 50 documents or something?

Is that even possible?

I think you can use Mail Merge to do this kind of thing.

I'm guessing your spreadsheet is in the .CSV format?

If you are using 2003, I'm not sure what the headings are at the top, but with 2007 you need to choose the mailings tab and then select start Mail Merge.

Select the Wizard and you should then have an option somewhere down the line to import a data source.

After doing this you should be able to insert the merge fields which should look like <<Surname>> or something like that.

From this you should then be able to create a template letter and print all the records out.

Hope this helps,
Cornzey

EXCEL is ideal for applications like this. It can give you a very simple WORD mail merge job, because it's so easy to reorganize the data in the spreadsheet.

Suppose your data (Name:, Rank: etc.) is in three columns, A, B, and C. Why not use column D on the spreadsheet to combine them just right? - with any punctuation, additional wording, spacing, which you can do with text formulas. It's so much faster than playing with the layout at the merge stage. Allowing for a heading, if your data starts on Row 2, put a formula like this in Cell D2:

=A2&", "&B2&", United States Army, "&C2

When cell D2 (commas, spaces, extra words) looks exactly right, copy that down Column D as far as is appropriate for your letter/citation.

The WORD HELP file is pretty good on the whole process, and it helps to get your data source right (Column D) and close the file. Then use WORD to prepare the main document before you bring the merge helper in. Finally, in a routine WORD mail merge (if such a thing exists), your main document, the "citation", only needs one merge field, and you can nominate the EXCEL file as the data source for that.

Will the merge create different documents?

It should do.

If you use Mail Merge you should have as many documents as there are records.

Ok, I'm not too familiar with mail merge (although I knew the concept and that was the basic concept I needed here) but I will try to find a tutorial on how to use it.

I found one you can try:

Mail Merge Tutorial

Hope this helps,
Cornzey

cornzey, on Jun 25 2008, 11:48 AM, said:

The mail merge will produce different pages in one document or one file.