Mail Merge - IncludePictures -->Creating a School Yearbook

K

Kory Hagler

I am trying to merge about 300 photos in .jpg format along with the names
that go with them into a Word table. The photos are named with numbers that
correspond to Student ID's at an elementary school. The data source is an
Excel file with the following info:
Grade (K-6)
Teacher (2 teachers per grade)
Student's First Name
Student's Last Name
name of the image file

In the yearbook, we want to have the 8.5x11 booklet set up like this:
I need the morning Kindergarten teacher and kids on one page, the afternoon
Kindergarten teacher and kids on the next page, then the 1st graders from
teacher X on next page and then the 1st graders from teacher Y on another
page all the way through 6th grade (each grade has 2 different classrooms).

I was trying to do this in Microsoft Publisher v2002, but not having any
luck. I think Word 2002 has a better Merge feature.
Here is what I posted in the Publisher newsgroup so that you have some
background info:
=====================================
The Principal of my children's grade school has asked me to put together
a
yearbook/annual for the K-6th grades. Does anyone have experience doing
this using Microsoft Publisher? I've got versions 2000 and 2002 but didn't
find any kind of ready-made templates that I could customize. The booklet
will be 48 pages, printed back-to-back with black ink and saddlestitched. I
will be doing all the layout and then taking the file to the commercial
printer to print out and assemble the booklets.

This past summer, I created a children's theater program that had
pictures
of the kids along with their name and character they played under their
picture; it also had advertisements from local businesses. Biographies were
also included in another section of the program. I've made tables in Word
and inserted pictures in the cells and that turned out very nice. When I
tried using tables in Publisher 2000, I wasn't able to get as specific as
to the size of the cells like I could in Word. What I ended up doing for
the theater program was creating the majority of it in Publisher and then
linking Word files that had the photos, names & characters (set up like a
contact sheet or index print).

Anyway, what would you suggest as the way to go about setting up this
project? There are over 300 kids and faculty to work with. I'm beginning
to wonder why I said 'Yes'.
===================================
Thanks for any direction you can give me.
Kory
 
D

Doug Robbins - Word MVP - DELETE UPPERCASE CHARACT

Hi Kory,

See the "Multiple items per condition" and "Graphics from database" items
under the "Special merges" section of fellow MVP CIndy Meister's website at
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/MergFram.htm

Word does not handle multiple items (students) per condition (teachers) very
easily.

I think that it would probably be easiest in the long run to use a label
type mail merge for each class with a record for the teacher inserted into
the data source along with those for the students.

Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP
 
D

Doug Robbins - Word MVP - DELETE UPPERCASE CHARACT

Hi Kory,

No, those instructions are valid for all versions of Word. Did you update
the fields in the document after executing the merge?

Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP
 
K

Kory Hagler

You are BRILLIANT! Your mention of "When you merge to a new document, the
overwhelming probability is that the images will not be present in the new
document. Alternatively, all the records may display the same image." Both
of those things happened to me and I thought I was totally messing up when I
went to print preview and saw what I did NOT want to see.
I've got the merge working fine now, but when I save the document, it
"Updates the links". Is there a way to NOT have it update the links when I
save? Or do I have to "break the link" and select a new data source each
time I want to do a merge?

I want to link the Word 2002 file that has the table with the photos and
kids names under their photo to a Publisher 2002 file as that is where I am
creating the yearbook/booklet. Can you think of things I should watch out
for?

Thanks again for being so very helpful!
Kory
 
G

Graham Mayor

See what you can do when left to your own devices for a few hours :)
Glad you found the fix.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP
E-mail (e-mail address removed)
Web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site www.mvps.org/word
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