[bgardner]

Does anyone know how I can go in to the Word Wizard letters and edit them?

Thanks.

[Melissa Siobhan]

which ones? Donor Acknowledgements and Receipts can only be edited while doing them. You need to open them in Mail and have live gifts that need to be done. Instead ofclicking merge at the bottom you click merge wizard at the top and it brings you through the process.

If planning on changing them I would do save as and make a copy before changing them. They are tempermental and if you mess it up you can always revert back to the old one.

We all wish they did this a different way and I am sure this has been filed as an Idea in the Ideas section. If you haven't been there yet it is a place to put the changes you want to RE and we bring the ones with the highest votes to a meeting with Forum members and BB staff at the conference.

[bgardner]

In our case membership renewal letters which come under the category of Donor Acknowledgment letters. They are in serious need of updating and can't just be annual change since in our organization we have new exhibits/events all the time. And so that would be helpful.

[jas.]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Melissa Siobhan

which ones? Donor Acknowledgements and Receipts can only be edited while doing them. You need to open them in Mail and have live gifts that need to be done. Instead ofclicking merge at the bottom you click merge wizard at the top and it brings you through the process.

If planning on changing them I would do save as and make a copy before changing them. They are tempermental and if you mess it up you can always revert back to the old one.

We all wish they did this a different way and I am sure this has been filed as an Idea in the Ideas section. If you haven't been there yet it is a place to put the changes you want to RE and we bring the ones with the highest votes to a meeting with Forum members and Blackbaud staff at the conference.

this is one of the things that drives me nuts -- NUTS -- about this process.

one of our higher-level donor groups have a bunch of different letters they send out for various scenarios -- pledges with a first payment, pledge payments, mid-cycle upgrades, all kinds of stuff -- and i've been fighting with the donor acknowledgment letters module in RE:Mail for quite a while now. it doesn't have all the fields I need. and of course we're still on windows 2000, which has issues of its own with big complicated mailmerges...

[bgardner]

I definitely know where you're coming from with the issues.

Good luck.

[SEllzey]

I gave up on doing letters in RE shortly after getting RE. I export the data files from Mail and merge in WordPerfect (an old version that has a fast and straightforward merge, since we have 20+ active letters at any time). I can change the merge forms in an instant, use simple queries, change paper size, just more control overall. And I can use headers/footers, which I never could find a way to do within RE. I also do receipts in WordPerfect. The only thing I use Word for in RE is a quick envelope or to cut-and-paste an address.

[bgardner]

We followed that method at a previous place I worked with. I agree on the control aspect but we're definitely trying to use the software as much as possible and if it gets extremely difficult we may revert to using that option.