Working on the Application

I'm generating the labels for this year's PALM applications,3047 of them, using MailMerge. When it works, MailMerge is magic. When it doesn't, what a pain! I produce registration confirmation letters and I vary the text based on whether this is your first PALM, your bus options, etc. This means that I have to change the letter once a year. So once a year I get to learn MailMerge again. This year it decided not to display MailMerge commands and the text options. No manual, of course so I had to turn to Help. What do you type in to get a list of the MailMerge commands and how to generate them? I tried "Mail Merge", all kind of things. Nothing worked so I displayed the MailMerge toobar to generate the options. All I wanted to do was to generate the {IF } commands. You can't type in {. That's taken as a character. Typing is what I do (old school). I was force to try to use the toolbar and point and click. I can never figure out why people use a picture (oh, excuse me, an icon) when they can use a word. Needless to say the toolbar didn't generate what I could use. I had to use Google and search entries to find out that Control F9 generates the { } pair that MailMerge takes as command delimiters. Why didn't I think of that? I did use the toolbar to toggle the settings so that I could see the MailMerge { IF } commands and the optional text I set up. Maybe there is hope for me yet.

I also do the PALM web site. After my rant, you can imagine what it looks like: lots of text and about one graphic image. Maybe if I started reading graphic novels instead of George Eliot the web site would stand a chance.