Our bishop is trying to send out a letter to the inactive members of our ward. I have been trying to figure out how to do a merge from the names in MLS with a letter in Microsoft Word. I have tried using the export function of MLS but the names go into the Excel csv document as "Last, First". That works well for address labels but not for addressing a label and I can't find a way of making first and last names 2 different fields.
Any ideas?
Mail merge from LDS
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If you use MLS's own Mailing Label function, it will print it as First Last.
If you're trying to do a mail merge into the letter, then I'd suggest using some Excel functions to parse the name field and reverse the order.
If you're trying to do a mail merge into the letter, then I'd suggest using some Excel functions to parse the name field and reverse the order.
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If anyone reading this is not very familiar with Excel, here are some formulas to extract the first and last names from a cell in "Last, First Middle" format:RussellHltn wrote:If you're trying to do a mail merge into the letter, then I'd suggest using some Excel functions to parse the name field and reverse the order.
- Last: =LEFT(A1,FIND(",",A1)-1)
- First & Middle: =MID(A1,FIND(",",A1)+2,99)
I would also note that if you have households with different mailing addresses than residential addresses, you might want to review the instructions in the wiki for Exporting Mailing Labels.
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fozzieqbear wrote:Our bishop is trying to send out a letter to the inactive members of our ward. I have been trying to figure out how to do a merge from the names in MLS with a letter in Microsoft Word. I have tried using the export function of MLS but the names go into the Excel csv document as "Last, First". That works well for address labels but not for addressing a label and I can't find a way of making first and last names 2 different fields.
Any ideas?
I do that by using the LDSql database, which imports the MLS export files and does some value-added processing. Among those features is that the database parses names into several forms suitable for mail-merge. For example:
John & Jane Doe (for address labels)
Brother and Sister Doe (for internal mail-merge within letters)
Once I have the LDSql database loaded, there a variety of ways to use those data elements in a mail-merge. It could simply be exported from a generic database tool in Firefox as CSV files, or an ODBC driver could be set up to connect directly to OpenOffice.
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