By In Office 2011 for Mac, mail merge works by bringing data stored in a data table into Word 2011. A good data table’s first row (and only the first row) has the headers, also called fields or column names.
This entry was posted in Mail Merge, Word and tagged conditional formatting, Conditional Formatting Word, mail merge, microsoft word, Word Fields, Word Mail Merge. I have a mail merge with excel as the data source. I need for the text in certain fields to be red. I know Word does not have conditional formatting, but is there a way to write a rule to color this text red if it meets a certain condition?
All subsequent rows contain data. There are no merged cells in a data table, and there are no completely empty rows or columns, although empty cells are allowed. Word can use many different data sources to perform a mail merge:. A table in Word. An Excel worksheet or data range.
A FileMaker Pro database file. Advanced users can use ODBC and VBA to connect to practically any data source, including Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL. If you don’t have a data table, the New Data Source option lets you make a data table from scratch in a new Word document using a series of dialogs. This option is fine for small databases up to a few thousand records.
Choosing fields for a mail merge data source When you choose New Data Source, you’re presented with the Create Data Source dialog. First, you define fields for your new data. By default, you’re presented with some commonly used fields. In the Placeholder List field, you can type new header names and add them to the list by clicking the Add Placeholder button.
When you’re done choosing field names, click the OK button and you will be prompted to save the new Word document. Give your new data source a name and then save the file. Filling in the data for your mail merge in Word 2011 for Mac As soon as your file is saved, you’ll be presented with an easy-to-use database input form called Data Form. The left side of Data Form shows your field names. Drag the scroll bar if all the fields don’t fit in the dialog. In the center column, you type the data entries for the current record. The current record’s number is shown in the Record navigation at the bottom of the Data Form.
In the Data Form dialog, press Tab or the down-arrow key to advance to the next field within a record. Press Shift-Tab or the up-arrow key to select the previous field. When working with your data table in Word, you can edit directly in the table. Turn on the database toolbar by choosing View→Toolbars→Database from the menu bar. Don’t let bullies try to say you shouldn’t do these things in Word. If you like Word and are comfortable with these tools, it’s perfectly fine to use Word for a basic database. You can use the Tables tab of the Ribbon with the Database toolbar to manage your table’s style, options, and borders.
Field Doesn’t Update Remember, most fields do not update automatically. To manually update a field, right-click it and choose Update Field, or select it and press F9. If neither of these methods works, check to make sure the field is not locked.
Try unlocking it by selecting the field and pressing Ctrl+Shift+F11. Also examine the field’s code and make sure that the! Switch is not present. (That switch locks the field against changes.) Check to make sure that it’s actually a field. When you right-click it, does the Update Field command appear on the shortcut menu? If not, perhaps it’s not a field; it might have gotten unlinked (perhaps you accidentally pressed Ctrl+Shift+F9 on it to unlink it), or it might not have been a correctly constructed field in the first place. If all else fails, delete the field and re-create it.
Locking Fields Against Updates Some fields can be locked, so they are never updated even when someone issues an Update Field command on them. For example, if you use a field to enter the current date on the day the document was created, you would not want that field to update every time you open the document. Some fields have a Prevent Fields from Being Updated check box in the Field dialog box. Marking this check box adds a! Switch in the code string for that field.
You can type the switch into the code string manually if you find that easier than going back to the Field dialog box. If the field you want to lock does not have that! Switch as part of its syntax, here’s another way: Click in the field and press Ctrl+F11. To confirm that the field has been locked, right-click it; the Update Field command is unavailable on the menu that appears. To unlock a field that has been locked this way, click in it and press Ctrl+Shift+F11. Updating Fields for Printing By default, Word does not automatically update fields before printing. This behavior is intentional, because it gives you more control over your data.
If you would like to change this behavior so that all links are updated before printing, open the Word Options dialog box (File, Options), click Display, and mark the Update Fields Before Printing check box. TIP You do not have to turn on Update Fields Before Printing for dates and times to update; they update automatically when you view the document in Print Preview or when you print. Finding and Moving Between Fields Sometimes it can be difficult to know where the fields are actually located in a document, especially when some of the fields do not contain visible content, such as a bookmark or index marker. There are several ways to surmount this obstacle.
One way is to select the entire document and toggle the field codes (Shift+F9). This method doesn’t take you to the codes, but it makes them easy to see. Another way, which you can actually combine with the preceding one, is to go to the next field code by pressing F11 or to the previous one by pressing Shift+F11. Word jumps to the beginning of the next or previous field. You might not see anything there (if the field is hidden), but after jumping to that spot, right-click the spot and choose Toggle Field Codes or press Shift+F9, and the field appears. A third way is to use the Go To feature to move from one field to the next. On the Home tab, click the Find arrow, click Go To, and choose Field from the Go to What list and click Next to go to the next field.
To review Go To as a method of finding objects, see “Using Go To,” p. Converting Fields to Plain Text If you decide at some point that you will never want to update a particular field again, you can convert it to regular text (that is, unlink it). Doing so copies its current value into the document and then deletes the field placeholder.