Retain form fields in a mail merge

[Domski]

Been given the nice little job of trying to save the council some money by sending out some communication that has previously gone by post through email. This amounts to about 11,000 emails with personalised letters attached as a Word doc.

The emails are going to contain a letter in the form of an attachment that the employee can either complete and return by email or print off, fill in by hand an post back.

I want to be able to process the attachments that come back by email automatically and therefore include form fields in the sections that the employee should complete so I can easily extract the information back into Excel.

Doing a mail merge gets rid of all the form fields in a word file as it seems to think they are merge fields to which I have found a solution here which is a bit clunky but works on it’s own although not with the other add-in that I use in Word to create individual letter files during the mail merge process (found here).

Anyone got any thoughts as to how I might be able to get around this?

Dom

 

[Macropod]

Hi Dom,

See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/286841

 

[Domski]

Thanks but that was the solution that I had found. Unfortunately I need to run the mail merge to individual files for attaching the letters to the emails which I was using another word add-in for and the two solutions don't work together.

Dom

 

[Macropod]

Hi Dom,

Basically you have two choices:
1. merge to separate documents, one at a time, then run the MS formfield macro against each new document; or
2. merge to a consolidated document, run the MS formfield macro against the consolidated document, which you then split into separate files.

Doug Robbins' macro (available from Graham Mayor's site) and the MS formfield macro could be combined to work with either approach.

 

[Domski]

Thanks mate, I'll look into it.

Dom