Word Mail Merge - keeping paragraph breaks that appear in original Excel cell data

[Cabopino]

Hi

I'm performing a Word directory style mail merge importing data from an Excel file which contains a text cell that contains paragraph/new line breaks but Word automatically strips out the paragraph/line breaks resulting in a block of text on merge.

I've tried changing the cell format in Excel to text/general but this makes no difference: as this mail merge document is destined for a non-techie user to take over I want to avoid any having to enter any special line break codes when entering new info into the spreadsheet or when running the mail merge - am I missing something?

Many thanks.

 

[macropod]

Paragraph/line breaks in your mailmerge data source are always deleted by a mailmerge; there's nothing you can do about that. Such data (e.g. for addresses) should most likely have a separate field for each line that is to appear in the output. With addresses, it's normal to have separate fields for at least the street address, locality, region and postal code; some even split the street address into number, name & type. Additional fields may be required for apartments/building names, business names and the like. The mere presence of such additional fields in the data source doesn't imply the need to have separate lines for them in the output - mailmerge field coding can be used to suppress unused lines.

 

[macropod]

Correction: Paragraph/line breaks in your mailmerge data source should be preserved, except where they're created by ordinary text wrapping or you have consecutive breaks with nothing in between them. In the latter case, the multiple breaks will be reduced to one. The workaround is to have at least a single space character on each nominal line. Regardless, my previous advice about the structuring of your data stands: doing so gives you far greater flexibility as to what can be done with the data in a merge.