I am trying to create a policy document that has to be signed from employees regarding their responsibility on devices that company has given to them. I have all my data in an excel sheet and from there, I have been using mail merge to create the general template something in the lines of: "<< User > referred as employee working as << employee_function>> ....". The problem is taking data stored in this excel sheet for devices since one user has more than one device (they are in multiple rows but having them merged or similar, does not help much) and put these data in a table on my word document for each agreement, I want to have as output. Is mail merge the solution for it or another approach should be taken? Can someone help with that?
You can use Word's Catalogue/Directory Mailmerge facility for this (the terminology depends on the Word version). To see how to do so with any mailmerge data source supported by Word, check out my Microsoft Word Catalogue/Directory Mailmerge Tutorial at:
or:
http://www.gmayor.com/Zips/Catalogue%20Mailmerge.zip
The tutorial covers everything from list creation to the insertion & calculation of values in multi-record tables in letters. Do read the tutorial before trying to use the mailmerge document included with it.
Depending on what you're trying to achieve, the field coding for this can be complex. However, since the tutorial document includes working field codes for all of its examples, most of the hard work has already been done for you - you should be able to do little more than copy/paste the relevant field codes into your own mailmerge main document, substitute/insert your own field names and adjust the formatting to get the results you desire. For some worked examples, see the attachments to the posts at: http://www.msofficeforums.com/mail-merge/9180-mail-merge-duplicate-names-but-different-dollar.html#post23345 & http://www.msofficeforums.com/mail-merge/11436-access-word-creating-list-multiple-records.html#post30327
Another option would be to use a DATABASE field in a normal ‘letter’ mailmerge main document and a macro to drive the process. An outline of this approach can be found at http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-word/many-to-one-email-merge-using-tables/8bce1798-fbe8-41f9-a121-1996c14dca5d
Conversely, if you're using a relational database or, Excel workbook with a separate table with just a single instance of each of the grouping criteria, a DATABASE field in a normal ‘letter’ mailmerge main document could be used without the need for a macro. An outline of this approach can be found at https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_winother-mso_2010/mail-merge-to-a-word-table-on-a-single-page/4edb4654-27e0-47d2-bd5f-8642e46fa103. For a working example, see http://www.msofficeforums.com/mail-merge/37844-mail-merge-using-one-excel-file-multiple.html
Alternatively, you may want to try one of the Many-to-One Mail Merge add-ins, from:
Graham Mayor at http://www.gmayor.com/ManyToOne.htm; or
Doug Robbins at https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=5AEDCB43615E886B&id=5AEDCB43615E886B!566