Hi Michael, I like to use XML from DP, it gives so much flexibility and DP writes XML so very well.
Unfortunately Word (at least Word 2003 - the latest I have used) does not have the ability to directly use XML as a data source (heaven knows why, perhaps they think it would put people too much into an open source thinking or something). But there are ways. Personally I prefer to use XML as the data source and to create a Word XSLT as the form document. You can then start to approach some of the flexibility of WordPerfect's merge using the rich capabilities of XPath and XSLT. In September 2008 I posted a series of articles of how to do this, I can post them again if you wish to go this way. This has a relatively steep learning curve but the results are great, and you can create Word documents without needing Word, which makes it good for server side automation, and web enabled DP applications. Alternatively I found an article which provides a program to perform a merge between a Word Template and a simple XML source. http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/i-n/internet/xml/article.php/c3423 Its a very simple method. Another method is to import the XML into Word and then use the resulting table as a merge source. Then of course you could just use a tab delimited or comma delimited file and merge directly using that, but my merges have always been too complex for that to work well. Regards Brian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Iannantuoni Sent: Saturday, 20 March 2010 9:29 PM To: DataPerfect Users Discussion Group Subject: [Dataperf] DataPerfect & MS Word Mail Merge I have a DataPerfect database that is used, for our village magazine, to keep track of advertisers, send out renewal reminders, invoices & receipts etc by producing, from reports, WordPerfect merge data files which are then merged in form letters within WordPerfect X3. This works fine and has done for many years, however because we are moving to another part of the country soon, I have to hand over this database to someone else who uses MS Word. Can anyone give me some advice and guidance please on how to produce MS Word merge data files from DataPerfect reports? TIA Michael _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
