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Any business with a large product line needs a
catalog of their wares to give out to customers. Lots
of businesses use Excel to store product
information, but it's not the best program for making nice
looking documents. Also if a picture is worth a
thousand words, you probably want pictures of your
items along with your descriptions. Using Word 97
or 2000's mail merge functions, you can format
your data using Word's text formatting capabilities.
Creating merge documents for tables, membership lists, or catalogs where one merged record should
follow the next on the same page is not difficult.
It works much like other types of mail merges. But
instead of specifying a form letter or labels as the
merge type, you just choose catalog instead.
Although you can bring in items from a database directly, for simplicity this article uses an
Excel spreadsheet as the data source. Once you
understand the technique, however, it's easy to use it with
other data types Word can import, such as Access.
Suppose for example, you sell antiques and you want your catalog to include the item name,
description, and price, along with a photo. To perform
a catalog merge, first you need to prepare the data
for the merge. Then you create the main mail merge document and include fields for the merge data.
Finally, you run the merge and add other
formatting, so the result looks the way you want.
Set Up the Data
To create the data table, open Excel. In the first
row, you need to type in the column names (these will
be used as your merge field names). So, type
ItemName in cell A1, ItemDescription in B1, Price in C1
and Photo in D1. You add your data into the rows
below. Entering data for the ItemName,
ItemDescription, and Price fields is straighforward. However, for
the Photo field you have to do something a little
tricky. You need to make sure all your images are in
the same folder and then you type in the filename
into the cell (such as box-sm.jpg).
The data in Excel.
Create the Main Document
Once the Excel data source file is set up, you need
to create the main document. When you prepare a
catalog merge, it's important to remember that
each record is going to appear one after the next. Any
text you type is also repeated for each record. So, if
your finished document requires introductory text and
a conclusion, you should add that to the merge
result, not to the main merge document. (In this case,
you might put in a separate introductory page, for
example.)
In this example, I want the item's picture next
to the text, so I need to set up two columns that
appear side by side. In Word, you can use a table to
achieve this effect. I decided to use a two-column table
with information on the left and the photograph on
the right. So I created a table with two columns
and three rows. The three text fields will appear in
the three rows on the left. I then merged the cells on
the right-hand side where the picture will go.
The main document.
When you have the your main document laid out, the next step is to set up the catalog mail merge:
- Choose Tools|Mail Merge.
- Under 1 Main Document: Create, select
Catalog, choose Active Window.
- For 2 Data Source: Get Data, select Open
Data Source. Change the File of Type to Excel
(.xls) and browse to find your file. Click OK to
confirm the data source.
- Word gives you a message asking if you want to
Edit the Main Document. Click Yes
- Use the Insert Merge Field Button to place
your ItemName, ItemDescription and Price fields in the appropriate cells in your table.
Because you want to include a picture on the
right, you need to add this field a little differently: you
need to use Word's IncludePicture field.
- Place the cursor in the second column of
the table.
- Press Ctrl+F9 to insert the field brackets.
- Type IncludePicture then a space. Then type
a quotation mark and add the pathname to the folder that contains your pictures. You need
to make sure you double the backslashes, so your pathname would look like D:\\Data\\pics\\.
- Click on the Insert Mergefield button in
the merge toolbar and select the Photo mergefield from the list. After the closing field bracket,
type a quotation mark. (Note: be sure that there isn't
a space in between the final backslash and the Mergefield command.)
- Type \d to link the graphic without saving
the graphic information within the document
(adding this switch reduces the Word file size). You
end up with a field that looks like so: {
IncludePicture "D:\\Data\\Pics\\{ MERGEFIELD Photo }" \d }
Now it's time to see how the merged result is
going to look. The easiest way to see how a merge is
working is to merge to a new document. (You can't
send it to the printer because the pictures will not have
updated correctly.) Click the Merge to New
Document button on the toolbar or follow these steps:
- Choose Tools|Mail Merge.
- Go to Step 3 Merge.
- Check that Merge To is set to New Document.
- Click Merge.
You won't see the pictures because you need to update the fields (some versions of Word also
give you a somewhat unhelpful error message).
Don't worry if there's a message, just type Ctrl+A to
select the entire document, and press F9 to update
the fields. Now you should see all the pictures.
To make it easier to read, you may want to add
extra space between each record and change the
border settings. You can insert a new row at the bottom
or top of the table in the main merge document and
adjust its cell height to addd more space. You also
may want to disable the option that lets cell
contents break across pages, so all of the information
about each item stays on the same page. To do this,
select the entire table in the Main document, then
choose Table|Cell Height and Width, and remove the
check mark next to "Allow Row to Break Across Pages."
The merge results.
Using a catalog mail merge, you can have it all:
lots of words and pictures together formatted exactly
the way you need them. Updating the catalog when
the data changes in Excel is simply a matter of
running the merge again and updating the fields.
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