Merging Data From Spreadsheets to or Documents

Transcription

1 Merging Data From Spreadsheets to or Documents Sometimes you have a list of data such as addresses that you want to be able to format in a document without having to reformat or retype the data into a wordprocessor. Things like form letters that businesses send out are created in such a way. With the power of the spreadsheet, you can target and send information to a select group of people from your list. Businesses use this method to target certain customers with new products. For example, a car company like Honda might send a custom printed brochure to all its female customers in Canada between 18 and 45 telling them about certain features of a new product. They may send a completely different message to all the male customers in Canada between 55 and 75. The options are endless. Combine with this and you have a powerful marketing tool. Here is the basis of this exercise. You are going to create a form letter that you could print and give out to friends that you want to invite to a pizza party. You need a ingredients list of at least 20 different items that different people might like to put on their pizzas. You will need enough foil pie plate so that each person can build their own pizza pie and put it in your oven. The only problem is that you are very busy at school and you don t want to have to play telephone tag with people to see if they can come so you decide to mail out your invitations. 1. Create a new directory called merge 2. Create a spreadsheet in Quattro Pro that has the following data items. These will be the field labels in your spreadsheet. a. First name b. Last name c. Street Address d. Town e. Postal Code f. Province or state g. Quantity - a quantity description of how much of that item you want that person to bring with them h. Item - will hold the name of the pizza item such as mozzarella cheese, green peppers, ham, pineapple, bacon, sausage, spinach, salami, hamburger, mushrooms i. Other - contains another item for them to bring - could be pop, juice, or their Black Eyed Peas CD j. Use the class ID given to you by your teacher. Save your work with the following file name- user_classid_pizza_party_data.qpw 3. Open WordPerfect 4. With your document open, Click Tools Merge

2 5. 6. Click Create Document Click Ok 9. Associate your document with the spreadsheet file where you have your information by clicking on the folder icon and choosing your spreadsheet. Note that you must change the type of file to all so that you can see the spreadsheet. 10.

3 Once you select your file, you should see the following tool bar added to your WordPerfect workspace. 13. Click on the Insert Field button. The column headers will be read from the Quattro Pro file and the dialog should look like this provided that you have set it up correctly For each item in the list, insert the reference to the field that holds that information that you want to display. After you have completed it. It should look something like this. 16.

4 17. Save your document - user_classid_pizza_party.frm. The frm extension denotes that the file is a merge compatible document. 18. On the merge toolbar, click Merge. The following dialog appears. 19.

5 20. The Output drop down contains options What are your output options a. Current Document will place the information in the current document. b. New document will create a new document and place the information in there where you can preview and save the merge as a new file. c. Printer will go directly to print. This doesn't give an opportunity to check the look of the output. d. will send the form letters to the outbox of an client loaded on the machine. Note that you data must contain a field with an address for each row. 23. You should choose the Output as: New Document 24. When the new document is created, check over the letters to make sure that the merged data makes sense in your document. If you need to make a change to the data, close your frm file and open the Quattro Pro sheet and make your data changes. Then redo the merge following the steps above. 25. Save your merged invitations as: user_classid_pizza_party_invite.wpd 26. Done