Using photos in mail merging from an excel doc

Hi Bobbie,

I do not believe that mailmerge supports objects such as photos. If this is the case, one solution would be to have mailmerge merge a keyword text field such as

<Photo:Picture 1>

into each Word document, where "Picture 1" is the name of the picture object in Excel that you want merged into the particular Word document.

Then you could write a VBA macro that performs a second pass on all the merged Word documents, replacing the keyword text with the corresponding picture from Excel.

Damon

Oops, I think I accidentally used BBCode, which didn't appear in my posting. What I meant was this:


I do not believe that mailmerge supports objects such as photos. If this is the case, one solution would be to have mailmerge merge a keyword text field such as

<Photo:Picture 1>

into each Word document, where "Picture 1" is the name of the picture object in Excel that you want merged into the particular Word document.

Then you could write a VBA macro that performs a second pass on all the merged Word documents, replacing the keyword text with the corresponding picture from Excel.

Damon

Okay, that didn't work either. How about this as the missing text:

{Photo:Picture 1}

Thank you, and i will try that. I do not know much about VBA codes or macros, but it does make sense. I have inserted the photo file into the colum where I want the photo located, so if you click it on the spreadsheet, it opens the photo. So, what you are saying is that I can insert a macro that tells it to click it open, and then it will apear on my merge?

Thanks, I will use that and try to make it work.

Hi again Bobbie,

I had assumed that you had the pictures pasted into Excel. If I now understand correctly, what you have in Excel are hyperlinks to various pictures? If so, the mail merge is probably just pasting the text string corresponding to the picture file path into Word. Is this correct?

Either way, you still will probably need a macro to loop through all the merged files and convert the picture file path text strings to true hyperlinks so that they will open when clicked on. Or, if you want the actual pictures pasted into the Word documents the macro would have to go get the file corresponding the the text string path and paste it in. This macro would need to be run as an additional step after the mail merge is completed.

Damon

I did have the photo copied into my spreadsheet, but the photo just sits there, the cell does not contain the file. So when I merge, the merge picks up the cell value as empty. So I was trying to make the cell contain the photo, so I did an insert file. When I insert an object, an image doc, or hyperlink, the photo or icon also sits in the cell, but the cell does not contain the information to be picked up on the merge. That is my problem.

Thanks,
Bobbie

Hi Bobbie,

Yes, as you have discovered, pictures can't be put "in" cells. When a picture is pasted onto a worksheet it resides in a layer on top of the worksheet and is not associated with a particular cell. If you want to merge the picture into your Word document I think you will have to use my suggestion about following your merge operation with running a macro that inserts the pictures, using something like I suggested (keyword containing name of picture) to determine where in the Word document to paste each picture.

Damon