Adding fields to Letter Writing Assistant

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Is there a way to add fields to the toolbars when in Letter Maintenance? I know how to use the toolbars available to add the fields to the reports, but we don't have all the fields we would like to use.

For example, on a Employee form, we would like to include the User Defined 2 field (which we use for FTE). Is anything like this possible??

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Richard Whaley 25,195 on at

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Export the tables to Excel and write your docs in Word with mail merge?

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L Vail 65,271 on at

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Hi,

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by adding to the toolbars, but I think you mean making more fields available to the letter in letter writing assistant. The answer is YES! :)

The letter writing assistant uses Word's Mail-Merge functionality to compose the letters. All you need to do is add an existing list, identify the sql server, pick a database, pick a table and the fileds will be available if they are not already present.

While Richard's solution would certainly work, I would not export anything to Excel when the data ia sitting in a perfectly good database already.

Your modified, or newly created letter will become part of the list of documents you have to choose from in the letter writing assistant. It is a great tool that is vastly underutilized.

Be aware that the default location for the letters is local. If you want others to be able to access them, you will need to copy them to a shared location and change the letters location in everyone's Dex.ini file.

Let us know if you need more.

Kind regards,

Leslie

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This is great news that's it's possible!! I'm close, but the mail merge data isn't pulling through when running the file from Letter Writer.

Here's the steps I went through..

I went to an employee and then created a new letter under the Employee category (called Test). I opened up Mail Merge, connected to the company database, and then pulled Employ ID, First Name and Last Name. When I test the mail merge in Word, it works.

However, when I run the file from Letter Assistant, it says the merge fields are invalid.

I must be missing some connection so Great Plains can connect to the Mail Merge I built, but I'm not sure what it would be.

Thanks so much for your help!

Justin

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L Vail 65,271 on at

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Hi Justin,

I'm going to give this a shot and see if I have better results. I'll make note of the steps and will report back.

Kind regards,

Leslie

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Hi Leslie,

I appreciate the help. I spent time today researching and trying a few things in Mail Merge. If I use the "Match Fields" piece of Mail Merge, I no longer get the errors, but no information pulls through, unless the field name matches one that already exists through the standard ones Great Plains offers. Hopefully you have more luck! I'll keep trying, something is bound to work!

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Community Member on at

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Hi Leslie,

I have tried a few times, but am not having any success with the mail merge. Have you been able to try the steps out?

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L Vail 65,271 on at

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Hi,

Oh gosh,

I got tied up with a job and this got by me. I'll take another look at it and write down the steps.

Leslie

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Community Member on at

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I'm also interested in this. I'm trying to add the field RV010121.REVIEWSETUPNAME_1 to an Employee document, but when I do, all of the other existing fields show up as invalid merge fields. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

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Shady Kaaky 440 on at

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Hi Leslie,

Any update on this. I'm having the same behavior Merge Field not found...

Did you have to modify the macros in WordIntegration.dot?

How did you map the list from GP to the SQL datasource?

Thanks.

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I still have not found a way to do this either. I attempted modifying the macros in WordIntegration.dot early on. I was able to get a new field available, but could not figure out how to map that field to anything in GP

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