[smithj]

We are using Office 03 on our gift processor's machine and just recently the conditional mail merge has started do odd things to formatting. The justification will be off, the bolding will be gone, the date may decide to italicize itself etc.

The conditional mail merge uses the letter field from RE and based on this pulls in a word document which is associated with that field.

The fiel has been tweaked over the years and we have tried to recreate it from scratch and it will work for a few days and then go back to the oddities again.

Has anyone run into this before? Both myself and the IT dept are almost out of ideas.

I am reinstalling Office right now in hopes that will help.

Thanks, Josh

[jas.]

I have definitely run into this problem before, but I don't have an answer for you. I am about to set up large conditional merges on 2003 (we recently upgraded from 2000 finally), and I was hoping it had been fixed...

[Sbest]

Hello,

Are you using RE: Mail to merge the letters directly to Word? or are you using it to create and export file which you then merge into and RE Merge Document to create the letters? We used to have a lot of problems but after i rebuilt all the template from scratch back in june 07 things have been totally smooth. Feel free to email me directly if you would like to discuss how we overcame this issue.

Steven
sbest@bccancer.bc.ca

[nisaac]

If this is the same issue we had - I can tell you what worked for us. Pick one of your letters and format it exactly the way it should be. Move this letter to the top of the list in the conditional merge. RE uses the first letter's formatting for the rest of the letters in your conditional merge. Hope this helps.

[skippy964]

Nora's solution can be found in the Knowledgebase. This is a new solution reported in RE 7.80.

Typically in the past when this happened, the mail merge had to be recreated. Also, conditional mail merges are typically more prone to corruption. Another tip...when editing letters click Save in MS Word before Clicking Save and Return to RE 7.

[mwittman]

We had the same problem here (even using RE Mail Merge without the added complexity of conditional merging). We got tired of RE Mail's finicky Merge behaviour, so though there are pros and cons, we started doing Export, then Merge outside of RE.

To make life easy and speed up the steps, I built a custom MS Access application that organizes and automates some of the process. When I get a chance, I'll add it to blackbus Shared Files.

[nisaac]

There are often reasons to do things in different ways and I'm definitely for doing what works for you. I do have to say though that we merge hundreds of letters a week using three different acknowledgement merges. We use the letter code to indicate appeal, fund or postcard and pull the letters in this manner. by daily mail batch. We also have about 40 different letters we use for these daily mailings.

It is very automated for us.

[kas]

I was having a similar problem today... and managed to find a solution through trial and error.

We have our receipts run through donor acknowledgement letters... Through a conditional word merge based off of the 'letter' field on the gift records. I had a donor acknowledgement letter that was in 11pt (any larger and it pushed onto a second page), but no matter what I tried, everytime I tried to run the merge it spat the letter out at 12pt (and thus splitting that particular letter onto a second page).

I had a play around with resetting the styles of the document, but that didn't seem to work.

Finally, I tried something that resolved the issue! Instead of using the 'normal' style in Word, and changing that to 11pt... I set up a whole new style for 11pt text. That fixed the problem instantly.

It seems that RE seems to do something funny with the default styles in Word. Maybe try setting up new styles (under the format menu) for your documents. It worked for me