Can I preview 'Next Record' in Mail Merge?

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Can I preview 'Next Record' in Mail Merge?

I'm a recent MS Office refugee.

I have a four-page Pages 09 document (a customer contract) that contains several Mail Merge fields drawing from a Numbers spreadsheet (client information) containing multiple row (records). Each row contains data for a different client. Let's say I have 50 client records in the Numbers spreadsheet and I want to generate a Pages 09 customer contract for client number 29 in the Numbers spreadsheet. From what I can tell, I would have to do a mail merge to a new document that would contain 50 4-page contracts. I would then have to find the 4 pages that include client number 29 and then delete the other 196 pages in order to get what I want.

In MS Word I could simply preview the 'Next Record' in the merge. Once I was previewing the proper record, I could simply export a document that included only that record's data.

Does anyone know if something similar can be done in Pages? Or, do you have a different suggestion for me?

Posted on Jul 27, 2012 8:58 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 27, 2012 10:15 AM in response to jermgold

J,

I'm not familiar with the Office technique, but if I was only going to only ever merge one contact at a time, I would create a small merge table pulling data from a main data table. There are certainly many approaches to this, but I would probably do something simple like adding a selection column to the main table with checkboxes to signal which record I wanted to have in the merge table.

Jerry

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