How to insert formated text into a merge field in word? - ms-word

Ive got a word document with a lot of merge fields which look like this:
{ MERGEFIELD SOME_FIELD }
This works fine with unformatted text. But now I want to insert formated text this way. So the content of "SOME_FIELD" will be created out of Rich Text, including cursive and bold parts and newlines.
Is there a way to use merge fields where the formating comes out of the content of the related field. It does not have to be rich text.
All I found until now are solutions with automation. Like this: Word VBA macro to insert file and merge formatting
But this does not word for me because in the moment I write the content of SOME_FIELD I don't have access to automation.
SME_FIELD is set with access vba like this (in the example the formating is set with rich text but I can use another formating language too):
dim richText as string
richText = "Hey look, \b I'm bold \b0 and I'm not"
with CurrentDb.OpenRecordset("Select SOME_FIELD from SOME_TABLE")
Call .MoveFirst
!SOME_FIELD = richText
Call .Update
end with
I thought that there might be some other formating tags which word can read, but I did not find any.

It seems like its not possible to insert format information to word via a merge field.

Related

Dynamic display text MS Word Mail Merge

Is there a way to make the Hyperlink field have dynamic display text as well as dynamic URL? So far, I have the following merge tag, which is correctly pulling the URL from my CSV data source
{ HYPERLINK "{ MERGEFIELD URL}"}
I hit Alt+F9 to toggle between field source and display preview - I see I can set static text as the URL's display text, but I need to use a merge code as the display test.
The hyperlink documentation just indicates static text, I don't see a way to add a merge field. A couple of place I've seen indicate you can insert a merge tag when editing he display text, but it doesn't save correctly (on Save, it just drops the hyperlink entirely).
By default, if you insert a mailmerge field into a hyperlink field, the hyperlinks will all show the first record’s address as the 'Text to display' text. Here's how you can do get a mailmerge to display your preferred default 'Text to display' text instead:
Disregarding mergefield issues for the moment, insert a hyperlink
into the document in the normal way, choosing whatever 'Click Here'
text you want in the 'Text to display' box.
Select the inserted hyperlink and press Shift-F9 to expose its field code.
Replace everything in the field after 'HYPERLINK' with your mergefield.
Select the field and press F9 to update the display.
In Word 2007 & later, you can make the display text variable also, by following these additional steps:
Position the cursor anywhere within the display text.
Insert a mergefield pointing to whatever data field you want to use for the display text (this could even be the same field as used at step 3 above).
Delete all of the previous display text either side of your last-inserted mergefield (note that this field will likely have updated already).
Execute the merge.
After merging to a new document, use Ctrl-A, F9 to update all fields. Without this, the mergefield hover text won’t update to the correct targets.
Note 1: The above is only for merged output sent to a new document; it does not work with merges to email or print. For merges to email, see: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/912679
Note 2: Hyperlink fields modified this way are liable to cease functioning once the merge has been executed. Accordingly, it's best to save mailmerge main document before doing the merge and not re-save it afterwards. If you need to make changes to the mailmerge main document, don't make/save them after doing a merge; make/save them beforehand.

Is there a text component that can sets the tags in the text?

I am looking for a component which of the typed text the user is looking for regex. If it finds the indicated text, the text will be tagged.
It is possible to configure input / text edytor components to work this way?
as a result, as I write the day of the week in the text, it will be marked as a tag. It looks like it can be a text field with the ability to set patterns so that tags are tagged.
For example in Jira application, when we enter a text and input component recognize that the text contains First and last name that highlights these words

Is There a Way to do a Spanish/English MailMerge?

I have an SSRS report that has Spanish and English text boxes. If the dataset row is a Spanish speaking person, an expression in each Spanish textbox shows that and hides the English textbox. These textboxes are exactly placed over each other.
My boss wants me to use SSRS to generate an Excel spreadsheet from the dataset(this is not hard) and use Word template for a mail merge. However, I am having trouble trying to figure out if I can hide all English when row is a Spanish row and vice versa. These are health clients of Spanish and English nationality.
I can do mail merges attached to a Recordset, I can do one in English, one in Spanish. I am trying to avoid this and have it all in one Mail Merge.
Areas marked in red will change to Spanish translation and/or date format. The dates are a no-brainer I can use a conditional IIF, however the formatted body I have no solution for, based on value in Field "CL_Language" which is either "Spanish" or "English".
====================================
The merge fields for dates and greeting are easy. There is no merge field for the text. And yes, only option might be for 2 separate reports with different Recordsets.
It's not clear what the actual issue is but...
Instead of hiding textboxes, which could cause problems when exporting etc., why not set a single textbox to the correct language text using an expression?
Something along the lines of
=IIF(Fields!Language.Value = "English", Fields!MyEnglishText.Value, FieldsMySpanishText.Value)
I found a solution. But it could be very difficult for the client to create. It involves hitting Ctrl + F9 which will create curly brackets {}.
Inside those curly brackets an IF statement is placed and I just pasted the whole Spanish formatted body in the true area, and the whole English body in the false area.
{IF "CL_Language" = "Spanish" "spanish body text here" "english body text here"}
Very strange syntax and you need to right click on the area to see choices like "Toggle Field Codes" (IF statement get's hidden), "Edit Field", and "Update Field". With Edit Field and Update Field you get a popup with the fields in your recordset.
If you saw the examples in my question, you can see that is some big clunky text AND . . .inside of it is a merge field that works! The Excel recordset comes already with the month name in correct language for each row.
Since it is not smart to include links that might expire, I am including the Google text I used to find this solution. Then I took a chance on a huge formatted chunk of text with a merge field inside of it.
Google this: "If Merge Field then"
Now is this a viable solution for the client versus just having a Word template for each language?
I think this is too difficult and I even duck when running it. Also, once it's working, if I look at the toggled code, the Conditional field no longer says the field name, but the value in the field, go figure.
{IF "Spanish" = "Spanish" or {IF "English" = "Spanish" instead of {IF "CL_Language" = "Spanish" or {IF "CL_Language" = "English"
Here is how to access the fields using right click. (remember, your curly brackets HAVE to be created with Control + F9).

How to do search and replace involving fields in Microsoft Word?

I have a Word document with fields of the reference variety, which occur in the form "[field].[field]"--in other words, there's a period between the two fields. I want to globally replace this with a space.
Word offers the ^d special character to search for fields, but for some reason the query "^d.^d" does not find anything. However, ".^d" does. Now comes the problem, however--what do I specify as the replacement text in order to retain the field code? If using regular expressions, I could use a "Find What Expression" such as \1, but with regexp ("wild card") mode the ^d is not permitted.
I guess I could write a macro...
I would like to add to Bibadia's solution.
An example of an index entry field; we want to change a name we misspelled.
Make sure hidden formatting is displayed (toggle with SHIFT+CTRL+F8).
Make sure wildcards option is not selected. To search for fields, use the opening and closing field braces code (optionally use ^w for spaces, as Bibadia suggested):^19 XE "Deo, John" ^21
Replace won't recognize field braces character, but will allow to insert the clipboard's content. ;). To do that, insert in text the correct entry. CTRL+F9 to insert field and type:XE "Doe, John"
Select the field above and copy
Use ^c in the replace box
Hit Replace All
Ta-da!
It's usually better to go the macro route when finding fields because, as you say, the find algorithm that Word uses doesn't work the way you might hope with fields.
But if you know exactly what the fields contain, you can specify a search pattern that will probably work (however not in wildcard mode).
For example, if you want to look for figure number field pairs such as
{ STYLEREF 1 \s }.{ SEQ Figure \* ARABIC \s 1 }
(which would typically be the same set of fields everywhere in the document)
If you only really need to look for the following:
{ STYLEREF 1 \s }.<any field>
you could ensure that field codes are displayed and search for
^d STYLEREF 1 \s ^21.^d
or
^19 STYLEREF 1 \s ^21.^19
If you need to be more precise, you can spell out the second field as well.
"^d" only works for finding the field beginning, not the field end.
It's a shame that ^w wants to find at least 1 whitespace character because otherwise it would be more robust to look for
^19^wSTYLEREF^w1^w\s^w^21.^19
Perhaps someone else knows how to work around that without using wildcards?
Torzaburo,
I suggest that you do this using a macro. You can start by recording the macro, and later refining your processing steps within the macro.
First turn on the hidden characters by navigating to Home > Paragraph > toggle the show/hide Paragraph symbol. Also, select all and toggle the field codes on (right-click and select "Toggle Field Codes".
Open a new blank Word doc in addition to the one you have open. You will use this later. Start the macro recording and find the field using the "^d" (field code) as you said.
When the field is found, copy only the field text within the brackets, and not the full field reference. While the macro is still recording, ALT + TAB to the new blank document and paste the field code in as plain text.
At this point, do the necessary find & replace processing to the field codes. Highlight the processed field codes, copy, ALT + TAB back to the original document, and paste back between the { } brackets.
Stop the macro recording. Add any further custom processing to the macro VBA.
Select-All and re-toggle the field codes. Update the field codes.
You don't need a macro. Just toggle all field codes on by using Alt+F9. Then do a find and replace for what you want to change. Once the replacement is complete, use Alt+F9 again to toggle the field codes back off.
Disclaimer: I didn't originate this solution, but it's clean and elegant and I thought it should be included here:
(Adapted from Search & Replace Field Codes in Word):
Create or find a single instance of the field you want to convert text to
Toggle Field Codes visible (AltF9)
Copy the code for the field you want to use to the Clipboard (highlight and CtrlC)
Open the Replace dialog box (CtrlH), insert the text you want to replace in the Find What box and then enter ^c in the Replace With box.
This will replace your text with the contents of the Clipboard, turning it into the field code you copied in step 3. It also copies formatting information (font, color, etc.), to control how the field will appear when hidden. (Caveat: I've tested this with Word 2003 under Windows 7 only.)
Coming in late on this, probably way too late for Beth (sorry Beth). And this may not be quite what Beth was looking for. But for anyone interested ...
It sounds like Beth may have created captions throughout the document using INSERT CAPTION (hence the presence of field codes). This means these captions will have been (automatically) created in CAPTION style.
To globally replace the separator "." with " " (space) in such captions, take two steps:
[1] Go to REFERENCES | INSERT CAPTION, then click on NUMBERING and replace the SEPARATOR "." with "EM-DASH". This will replace all separators in captions for the selected label in the CAPTION Window. If you have other labels in use in the document (e.g. FIGURE), select the other labels one by one and repeat this process.
[2] Do a find/replace searching for special character "em-dash" (^+) in style CAPTION, replacing with " ". Click REPLACE ALL.
Voila!
NOTE: This presumes that em-dash does not appear in the caption text anywhere. If it does, then you'll need to do a pre- and post- "fiddle" to ensure these em-dashes are not touched by the global replace above.
The "pre-fiddle" is to do a global find/replace across captions, replacing the em-dash ("^+") with some other string (e.g. "EM-DASH") that doesn't ever occur in any caption's text. Then you do the separator change as described above. Finally, the "post-fiddle" is to restore the em-dashes that were in the captions, by doing a global replace of the string "EM-DASH" with the actual em-dash character "^+".

Advanced Search in MSWord - how to insert text before a specific font

I need some help with a macro or VB script in Microsoft Word. I need to parse a document using the formatting alone. I want to use the advanced search feature to find a certain font format and then insert a carriage return ahead of that formatted text.
For example, let's say I have the following text:
BAR FOO FAR BOO BEAR FOO
I want to search for the bold font and then insert a (^p) mark before the bold text which would insert the CRLF. I can't search based on the text because the text varies, but the bold formatting is consistent.
Is there any way to do this so I end up with the results:
BAR
FOO
FAR
BOO
BEAR
FOO
I have tried this numerous ways using macro and could not get this working. Ideally I would not have to parse this by hand...