I’m an inexpert user of Word, tasked with performing a mail merge with some very complex criteria. I’m pulling data from an Oracle database, but due to the nature of the data, I can’t pull all of the data together into one data source.
For example, my merge will create one document per employee in our company. Much of the data is on a “one row per employee” basis, and I have no problem merging that. However, certain parts of the documents have a “many rows for one employee” relationship.
So, what do you suggest? Some questions:
1. Is there any way for mail merge to handle multiple data sources?
2. If not, are there any approaches (master/sub documents?) that I could take that would allow me to create multiple documents and then merge the results?
3. Is there any way to use mail merge or anything to actually generate a separate Word file for each row of data, or can you only have it output to one big file or a printer?
4. If #3 is possible, can you use some sort of intelligence to assign the name to the Word documents?
I do have access to some people with VBA experience, if that’s necessary, so bring it on!
Please let me know what you think.
