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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

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Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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Help! A Mail Merge Beginner

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    Help! A Mail Merge Beginner

    I am trying to merge a list of names in Alpha 5 V7 with an existing letterhead created in MS Word 2003.

    I have tried to follow the directions in the Alpha Help but when I get to the place where Word asks for the address file, and I select the Alpha .dbf, I receive a nasty error telling me that it can not open the .dbf records.

    What am I doing wrong?

    HELP Please.

    TIA

    John

    #2
    Re: Help! A Mail Merge Beginner

    I don't think you will get that to work. Maybe someone has, but I never could work with the dbf directly. Alpha has built in mail merge with Word, you might read up on that. You wouild start in Alpha, rather than in Word as you are trying now. Even with Alpha, it exports the records as text in preperation for the merge. If you are using Word 2007, you might try outputing your Alpha data as XML for the merge.
    Steve Wood
    See my profile on IADN

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      #3
      Re: Help! A Mail Merge Beginner

      As Steve suggested, start in Alpha and create a new merge into a new document, copy and paste the existing Word document into the new document.
      If the exisiting document is too complicated to easily cut and paste, put the fields you want into the new document then save. Then copy the word merge fields in the new document into the existing document.
      The whole process generally takes a few minutes at most.

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Help! A Mail Merge Beginner

        SpellingJohn,

        We use Mail Merge quite a bit as we need to send redetermination notices to clients on a monthly basis.

        We merge our tables directly with Word. The trick that we found is to build a table that will contain only the records you need from your master table. This eliminates all of the query and filtering that might be necessary using only your master tables.

        In word, use the mail merge genie. Define your document, get the data source, then merge the two. It works very well, and the results are terrific.

        Tom
        Last edited by Tom Henkel; 07-31-2007, 08:05 AM. Reason: spelling

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          #5
          Re: Help! A Mail Merge Beginner

          Excuse me if this sounds rude but:

          I got Alpha because I wanted to send notices without having to use 2-3 or 4 different programs to do that.

          I can send notices every month, day or week with alpha and do not need word at all.

          Why is everybody trying to use a mail merge when we have all the tools needed within Alpha?

          I am trying to merge a list of names in Alpha 5 V7 with an existing letterhead created in MS Word 2003.
          Why not take that letterhead and move it into an Alpha Report or Letter? I bet it is a lot easier

          Dave Mason
          Dave Mason
          [email protected]
          Skype is dave.mason46

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Help! A Mail Merge Beginner

            Dave,

            Sometimes things are just easier to format using Word rather than Alpha.
            A few of our "letters" are 8 pages, double sided. This would take up to 4 separate letters in alpha as there is a length restriction on a letter of 22 inches (2 pages). We have word processing clerks who can do wonderous things with the format of a document. All I need to do is to put a few merge fields into the document, merge the table, and print away.

            Tom

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