A Technique to Emulate "Mail Merge" using Phonebook

The easiest way to do mail merge is to use the Phonebook's clip editor. Here's how.

First select or mark the records for which you want to generate a form letter.

Open a new Smart Clip definition. Type the form letter or switch to Memo and paste the form letter from an existing file into the new clip definition.

Select the fields you want to use in the right places and close and name your Smart Clip. Then use the database's print function and select Custom Style, your clip, 1 record per page, and print to file, name the file, and you're done! Of course, you may want to transfer the files to your desktop word processor to add special printing fonts and logos, etc.

Things become complicated when you want to select many records from a large database and generate form letters for all of them at different times of the month. The trick is to get the Phonebook to remember which "clients" or customers already have been sent the form letter.

You could do this by adding a check box field to the Phonebook with the field name "sent". When you've created and sent a form letter to the customer, just check the box. Create a subset based on the fact that the box is NOT checked. The next time you want to send some more form letters, just use this "NOT Sent" subset and create some more form letters using the "clip definition" technique above.

Next month, when it's time to start over and send more form letters, you could clear the check boxes with a suitable macro. However, it might be faster to modify the Phonebook database by deleting the "Sent" check box field, closing and then opening the Phonebook and adding the Sent field back into the record definition.

There may be cases where you want to use enhancements you can not easily have in a smart clip. In that case you should use a more powerful editor. Still, as long as you can switch between that and the database, I do not easily see cases where a key macro would not be able to solve the problem. Costs you an hour perhaps, if the case is complex, but you will save your macro and have it forever.

Geert