Insert database field into a paragraph of text

[MSullivan]

Hi All,

Currently one of our team members enters large amounts of new client data into our system, and then manually sends them out a letter.
As you can tell slowly retyping each companies address details on each letter takes a large amount of time after they've had their details placed in our CommitCRM database.

What I'm trying to do is write a report that we can run with a filter placed on at generation time, to select a bunch of new accounts, and auto populate the letter so it reduces a 2 hour task to a 3 minute task. Unfortunately, this letter has the business name that we are sending it to placed in the middle of a paragraph of text. I've tried a few things, but I just can't seem to find a way to be able to make the data base field of the business name be inserted in the middle of a paragraph.

I have been able to do it "messily" by inserting a text box with the first part of the paragraph, then the database field, and leaving a gap so that most company names will fit. Unfortunately this looks very unprofessional especially if the clients company name is quite short as it leaves a lot of white space.

I am relatively new to using the CommitCRM report writer, so I'm hoping this is just something simple that I have over looked.

Your help would be much appreciated!

Best Regards,
Matt

[Support Team]

Re: Insert database field into a paragraph of text

Hi Matt,

I think that you're looking at data merge where data fields merges into a paragraph of text. This is supported when using Email Templates where you can virtually embed any data field within any paragraph and all will be automatically aligned with no gaps or text overlapping. Reports are by design different. Each text or data are placed on the report as a separate field and thus merging one field within the other is not possible. What you can do with reports is either put the company name in the title of the letter so it does not have to merge, or to control the paragraph length in a way that the fixed text breaks a line just before where the company name should be mentioned and place the company name data field right below at the beginning of a new line. The other alternative I see is to export the filtered list of accounts to Excel and use Microsoft Word's Mail Merge feature to do just that. It'll allow you to select the fields to merge from your Excel spreadsheet into your Word letter and create any number of such letters for you (one per a Line in Excel).

I hope this helps.
Dina

[lpopejoy]

Re: Insert database field into a paragraph of text

Can't you use a CommitCRM Word template to do exactly this?

[Support Team]

Re: Insert database field into a paragraph of text

Hey Luke,

Yes, the Word templates indeed let you merge the data from RangerMSP, however, it does it per Account at a time. There is no way to perform a batch creation of such templates from within RangerMSP so this is why I did not mention it originally, though now I think I should have. Thank you for mentioning it.

So for batch letter creation - that's where the Excel option comes in, where you export the filtered list of Account with all the relevant data to a spreadsheet, and have Word Merge create the templates at once according to the list of Accounts (outside of RangerMSP).

Hope it's clearer.

Dina