Mail Merge - Joint Recipients in a mailing list

[Stroppy]

Hello all. What would be the easiest way to organise data so that individuals on a mailing list who live at the same address can opt to receive only one copy of a (merged) letter between them.

What would be the easy way to set the data source up to enable this? Main priority is for data in Excel or Word Tables. It has to be easy enough for *basic* users to understand and be able to do. Eg, Library Customer service people, admin assistants.

Thanks in advance for the excellent answers I am sure to receive.

Regards, M.

 

[Fae]

How about inserting a field called MAIL - Entry into that field must be either YES or NO - then when you run the mail merge you run a query on the MAIL Field - all the fields with YES - will receive mail.

Miracles we do immediately ...
imposibilities take a little longer.

 

[Stroppy]

Yes, that would be ok for simple ones. It gets a little more complicated when, for eg, like at a Kindergarten. There are parents with different names, elect to receive their email at the one address, get offended if both names aren't on the envelope and want letters to address them both: ie, Ms Brown & Mr Smith, 15 The Avenue, Melbourne

I am thinking it probably has to be a 2 or part merge, filtering out joint recipients and etc....

Was hoping someone with similar problem would pick up on this fiddly thing...

Thanks Fae, you've got me thinking about it again. Need to solve it this month

M

 

[ssprap]

I have a similar problem, however, mine covers many more people in the household than just 2. I was doing a merge for all women in a household. Some households had 4 women. That means 4 names and 1 address. I hope someone can solve this one. I have been researching it forever and can't find a solution.

 

[PWD]

Just an option, not a solution:- What if you know that you only want to send one mailing to each address then you can have multiple name fields for one address? "Ah yes, but what if blah blah blah?" Sure, just trying to inject a bit of lateral thinking! If the data can't be amended then I'm about as much use as a chocolate teapot, I'm afraid! OK. What if? You know that for any given mailing(s) certain people need to be flagged as joint recipients so you flag them and run a macro in Excel that creates a new data set from the original? All it would have to do would be to copy each record until it came to this flag, make a note of the address and copy all of the names against that address and copy the rest of the data; and so on through the records. Despite the rambling, hope this is of some use.
Des - IT Support bod.