[geeks] What happened to everybody?

[Dave Kimmel]

On Wed, 24 Jul 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> I had run into a problem that Words Mail Merge feature wouldn't
> handle, so I went and tried to write my own.  Man that was such a
> phenominal pain.  I ended up giving up and telling the person it
> couldn't be done unless they wanted to switch to a more sensible word
> processor.

Been there, done that.

The problem I had was using OLE Automation (or whatever its called now) to
do the mail merge.  I could not figure out how to do this properly.
Eventually I settled on writing my own using find and replace and looking
for tokens in the text (ie, "<<DATE>>").  That failed in a big, but
intermittent, way when I demoed it to management.  That sucked.

Eventually I found out (in MSDN, I think) that the Bookmark feature is
apparantly the only reliable way to do this.  Jump to a bookmark named
"Date", type the date, jump to "Date-1" and type the date, keep adding one
and repeating until it can't find the bookmark.  Then move to the next
field and repeat the process.

That has been working for the last year and a half or so.  And it produces
nice big stacks of letters (envelopes too!) every month.

-- Dave Kimmel
   crisco_kid at shaw.ca