Merging Pages/Numbers - Missing fields

Question

Merging Pages/Numbers - Missing fields

I have a pages document with multiple fields. It is a comprehensive progress report for students. The fields are the names of the various classes, completion, quality of work, and comments - all for each class. Those fields correspond precisely with fields in a Numbers document that have significant amounts of data in them.

When we do a mail merge to a new document, all of the fields import except the comments fields. The comments fields import sporadically. In the new document some of the comments fields appear, and some don't. There is no apparent consistency to this. I read this thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12749560&#12749560 That did not explain my problem. Some of the fields that don't import are far under 255 characters. Some of the ones that do are over 255 characters.

Any thoughts are helpful. If the comments don't merge, we're looking at having to hand copy and paste x80 students x10 classes. Eight-hundred C&Ps is not what we're into...

Bunches, Mac OS X (10.6.4), More bunches

Posted on Mar 8, 2011 11:05 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 8, 2011 11:37 AM in response to phospholipid77

p,

If you would copy a few of the fields that failed to merge and post them here, we might be able to spot something.

Jerry

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Answer 2

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,807 points

Mar 8, 2011 11:52 AM in response to phospholipid77

If I remember well, I met this behavior with tables whose some datas were dates.

As the dates were grabbed by a formula :
=my_formula,

I edited them as

=""&my_formula

This way, the values were no longer dates but text and the other fields were correctly merged.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 8 mars 2011 20:52:41

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Answer 3

Mar 9, 2011 10:21 AM in response to Jerrold Green1

Here is an example of a field from the numbers documents that did NOT merge over:

Unable to determine student achievement due to lack of work submitted (<70% of the assignments completed). Naadia and I have met to work on reading strategies. I am confident that Naadia can be successful and will be back on track by the next reporting period.

Here are two examples of fields that did from the same kind of column:

Careful attention to detail has improved your work. Keep it up!

Daria arrives to class with a positive attitude, but has difficulty contributing to class discussion. We switched to a new online homework submission program which has taken some adjusting. I think the missing work is attributed to the system, which practice will hopefully rectify. Only three classes in to the semester, yet it promises to be exciting.

Generally speaking, it is the longer comments that do not merge. And yet, the second comment above has 300+ characters. What is it about that field that allows it to merge, but not the others? Is it length, or something else?

I could remove last names from the data and post the files for people to test if that might help. We're desperate to get this right.

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Answer 4

Mar 9, 2011 11:01 AM in response to phospholipid77

So, from the other thread ( http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12749560&#12749560), I've done this:

"found something new - it did merge some fields longer than 255 characters if they had line breaks in them. and i think some of the lines were over 255... very confused now."

Adding a line-break within a cell seems to be working. Is there

1) any good reason for that?
2) any way to have it merge without going through the document and adding a line-break to all long cells?
3) if not, a way to automate adding line-breaks to all the cells that are long?

This is kind of a weird and frustrating quirk.

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Answer 5

Mar 9, 2011 12:25 PM in response to phospholipid77

Long and short are such relative terms 🙂.

I suppose you could call it a bug, or a design limitation or oversight, with an inconvenient workaround. It's pretty clear that the iWork architects never envisioned large documents being common, or such large amounts of data within one Mail Merge source cell.

I wonder if you could redesign your approach so that you don't need so much text in one cell. Maybe break the question down in to two or more parts in different cells.

Jerry

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Answer 6

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,807 points

Mar 9, 2011 1:20 PM in response to phospholipid77

It's clear that the merge feature was designed for addresses insertion.

I'm not sure that the problem is really with the long fields.

I wish to get a sample couple of files to make tests.

Click my blue name to get my address.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 9 mars 2011 22:20:56

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Answer 7

Mar 9, 2011 1:36 PM in response to KOENIG Yvan

I went ahead and set you those two files. Go ahead and take a look. I'm curious what you come up with.

Jaime

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Answer 8

Xelaju4

Level 1

10 points

Nov 26, 2013 1:10 PM in response to phospholipid77

I'm trying to merge a mailing list from Numbers to Pages. The Numbers document has several columns in it so I have the "First Name" & "Last Name" columns as header columns frozen so I can scroll to the right and still know who I'm talking about.

When I go to merge it to the Pages document I created, "First Name" & "Last Name" don't show up as Merge Field Options. Does that make sense?

Other than temporarily reverting the columns back to non-header columns, is there any way to fix that?

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