I have a customer who needs to print thank-you letters when they receive donations. Currently, the letters are generated as an Access report. Unfortunately, they need to be in Word format so the customer can "tweak" the content. Using Access' export functionality, I can convert them to Word documents, but the documents are not constructed properly. Each line in each paragraph converts to a separate word paragraph. Some components like images do not export properly. For these reasons, I want to instead create a mailmerge directly to Word.
Most of the components in the letter can be simple merge fields. Names, addresses and paragraphs will populate properly from the data source table. The challenge is a list of details in the middle of the letter body. Example:
Code:
Date Check# Amount Description
12/1 1234 $25.00 xxxxx
12/2 2345 $50.00 yyyyy
I was thinking of having a Word table in the middle of the document template, but it is unclear to me how to populate this properly in the context of a mail merge. There may be multiple details for each record (letter). In the Access report version, I simply had a sub-report for the details, but this doesn't seem to be valid for a mail merge.
Any idea how to populate a mail merge with multiple child records for each generated letter?
Thanks...
Edit: I suppose I could add some text fields to my output table, one field for each column shown above, and populate them before-hand with all the rows of detail data (so date 1 + CrLf + date 2, etc., goes into the "dates" output field, and similar for the other 3 output fields). Then I could use simple merge fields to show all the data. Would that be too complex?