What I've learned about Publisher this week...

[JoAnn Paules [MVP]]

Merging a mailing list from Excel into Word and then into Publisher is NOT a
fun task. Formatting is lost or boogered up. I've had to do things
twice....and sometimes three times. I'm on my fourth pass over the list of
just under 700 students to get the formatting the way I want it so that when
the inevitable changes are emailed to me, I can just pop them in with little
work. (Ha ha ha ha! Like THAT will really happen.)

<sigh> Back to work

 

[drc023]

I did the same thing when I was composing a directory for a local chamber of
commerce. Each line of the listing was different from the others. The
directory itself was multi column and each individual listing was laid out
like an envelope address, but line one was a larger bold font, line 2 a sans
serif font, lines 3 & 4 were a smaller font size. It took a few minutes to
set up, but I did the formatting for font and point size in Excel by making
using three columns. One column was for text, one column had the numbers
1,2,3,4 repeating for each listing and the third column was a straight
listing of numbers starting at 1 and ending with whatever number to equal
the final entry. I then sorted the data based on the column that had 1,2,3,4
repeating. That put all the line one entries together, line 2 together,
etc.... Then I marked all of line 1 entries and did the formatting, and
repeated it with the other groups. When that was done I used the other
number list to sort the file back into its original order. The only reason I
had to use Word was due to Publishers limitation of 128 lines from Excel. I
exported to Word and then into Publisher. It took me about 10 minutes to
work with very large listing. If the directory had used a single line for
each listing the job would have been easier since only columns needed to be
highlighted and formatted.