Do have a need to mail the same letter (perhaps a 'Season's Greetings' letter)  to multiple parties as a 'group'. Do you want to create a series of envelopes to clients or customers in your Instant Database records? Perhaps you have a collections practice and need to send the same demand letter to multiple debtors.

   That is what 'mail merge' is all about.

   Pathagoras provides an easy way to accomplish your mail merge tasks, and it can all be done with plain text. (We believe that Pathagoras is the only program on the market to offer "plain text" mail merge. It is really quite a remarkable tool. The draw back is speed, but the additional time needed to perform a mail merge in plain text is measured in seconds, not minutes. And with the ease by which the letter can be set up using plain text variables compared to fields is simply immeasurable.)

   If you plan to draw names and addresses from an external data source, you must point Pathagoras to at least one external database in the External Database settings. See the Setup section of this chapter. (You can set one or two external sources for your records.) If all of your data is contained within your Instant Database records list, you do not need to set the pointer.

   Pathagoras assumes that your mail merge list comes from on of three sources: From your collection of Instant Database records or from one of your two linked external database.

   To begin a Mail Merge session, display the document you wish to use as the mail merge template to your editing screen. (The document can be an existing document that your recalled to the screen, or it can be a document that you just now assembled. So long as it has [bracketed variables] that will pair up with your data, you are ready to go.

   With the document on screen, press <Alt-D> to bring up the Instant Database screen. Click the Power Tools button to display the Power Tools options (image below).

 

Click the Mail Merge button at the right. A screen will appear asking you confirm that the on-screen document is the proper mail merge letter. If it is, say "Yes." Then, the following screen will appear, asking you to select the source of the Mail Merge data.

Make your selection. Pathagoras quickly reads the data source and presents a checklist from which you can select one record, all records, or any number in between. When you have completed you selections, click the Merge button. Pathagoras will generate one letter per selected record. That actual 'action' is that Pathagoras recalls a document, replaces the variables, quickly replacing the plain text variables with the data.

   The results are presented on screen .

 

Please note the following:

Variables in headers, footer and textboxes take a lot of time to process. If you are processing more that, let's say 30 records and you need header/footer data, you may wish to 'fake' the header/footer. Do so by changing the margins of your document and place the same text at the extreme upper or lower edges of your document. (If you have fewer than 30 records to process, don't worry about the above. It will still take longer to process, but it is only a matter of a couple of seconds. It becomes really noticeable when you have more than 100 records.)

Blank fields: You have a choice about where to delete blank fields. If you do not delete blank fields keep in mind that that any fields that do remain will be 'called' the same thing. This works great when the remaining field is, let's say, a court date that will be the same for all records. Just scan the resulting mail-merged result, put in the date and all [Court Date] variables will be replaced with the same value. If you need different values for any of the remaining fields, .perhaps mail merge was not the correct technique.

"Good" blank fields vs. "Bad" blank fields: What if, after the initial mail merge, you have variables such as [Court Date] (which are probably okay, since you want to assign them later) and also variables such as [Address Line 2] which are present simply because you chose not to delete empty variables in the initial mail merge?

Actually, IDB works quite well for this situation. After you have run the mail merge, call up the Instant Database screen. Click scan. You will see [Court Date] (the 'good' variable) and [Address Line 2] (the 'bad' one).

Complete the former with a date,and leave the latter blank. Make sure you check the "Delete if Blank" box at the top of the Instant Database screen.

When you click the Next button, [Court Date] will be replaced throughout the document with the date provided, and all instances of [Address Line 2] will be removed. (The assumption here is that since the initial mail merge process did not replace [Address Line 2] with a value, that no such value exists. Running a 'regular' IDB process call against the document will remove those variables if the "Delete if Blank" selection made .)