That's a lot of extra work. You can make your mailmerge conditional upon
the value of a field in XL.

in Word's Data Merge Manager, click the Query Options/Filter Records
tab. Select your field and choose "is equal to" from the Comparison
dropdown, and enter "a" in the Compare To textbox.




In article ,
"dvya" wrote:

I am using a excelsheet to track attendence at my preschool.

I have a table, the first column is a list of 200 names, the next 20 columns
are all the school days of the particular month. For each school day i have a
letter code i.e. a=absent p=present. Every time a child is absent i have to
track the reason, is the child sick? did they go on vacation? etc..

What i would like to do is to have excel automatically generate a letter that
I can sent to the parents if the attendence code is "a"(absent).

In my limited knoledge of excel i figured that the best way to do this is ,
to bring forward to another sheet every instance where "a" is used along wth
the childs name and date of absence, and then run a mail merge on this sheet.

Is this the best way?

What formula would i use to do this?