Hi all,
Devo has requested a process they can use to create itemized tax letters for FY2019. They want to be able to print and mail a letter that includes a message from our Director of Development and then has a table of each contribution a patron has made in a year (eg row 1 is a gift on 1/5/2019 to the Annual Production Fund, row 2 is a Gala ticket purchased on 8/9, etc.). I am able to use an output set to export all of the data I want to an Excel spreadsheet, but I am absolutely unable to come up with any process by which to take that data and put it into a single letter per patron by way of a mail merge in Word. I am wondering if anyone else has any similar processes that they are willing to share as I'm at my wit's end trying to get this to work. I've considered using a flattening technique in SQL but I'm nervous since that only really works well if you want a fixed number of contributions, and I don't want to have to re-code the process based on how many gifts the top donor in a year has given every single year.
We did this kind of thing when I was at BAM.
I found this YouTube video about using a “Directory”. This appears to be a newer Mail Merge feature.
Here is one about using NextIF
If I remember correctly when I was at BAM we used the NextIF method.
There is also a third party plugin. I’ve never used this. Go with due caution.
https://chrismenardtraining.com/post/many-to-one-mail-merge-in-microsoft-word
Let us know how you get on with this. This can be done with MS Word Mail Merge. However this is an advanced technique.
Good luck.
Tom, thank you for this. I did find those two videos, but for some reason seeing it again helped me understand the step I was missing when applying it to the more complex template I'm attempting to make. For future forum uses, NextIf won't prevent future merge fields from printing, it just will print the same record again since it didn't advance, so I need to add a check on the proceeding lines to make sure the row has changed.
Between this and the new utility mentioned below I think I should be well on my way!