I have a bit of a problem with a job I am doing involving the printing of about 400,000 postcards each containing 1 photo selected from a database of 1000 - ie, about 400 cards for each photo. The data that accompanies each photo is in a spreadsheet which conatins a file id of the relevant photo. All this is to be mailmerged with an address database.
At the moment I'm doing this the longwinded way - creating a separate data file for each photo, adding the photo into the document then merging the relevant data file and sending to print. This works okay, it's just time-consuming, and as I've also got to print 400,000 letters to go with these postcards I have beentrying to find a better way of doing this.
On the face of it, it should be possible to do this job easily, by creating one combined database, and then using the field codes INSERTPICTURE and MERGEFIELD to do the job. Unfortunately I'm having a problem here.
Because of the need to incorporate the MERGEFIELD within INCLUDEPICTURE the only way of doing this (to my knowledge) is to manually input the instruction by setting up using CTRL+F9 to create the brackets, and then typing it all in. However, this doesn't seem to produce results. For example, assuming all files are in a directory called TEMP on the D drive, and the field on my database containing the photo name is called PHOTO my command should look like this:
{INSERTPICTURE "D:\\TEMP\\{MERGEFIELD photo}.JPG" }
That does nothing!
The only clue I have is in a test I carried out.
If I try to insert a single picture using the INSERT option off the menu this will generate the following code, for example:
{INSERTPICTURE "D:\\TEMP\\photograph1.jpg"}
and this succesfully prints the specified picture.
However, if I use CRTL+F9 to create the {} and then enter the text as above this fails to print anything.
This suggests that manual entry doesn't work
Microsoft say it does work, and should produce correct results, but beyond that my cat is more help than they are.
I've tried this in both the 2003 and 2007 versions of Word, with the same result.
Any useful suggestions would be much appreciated.
EDIT
Some progress, at least in Word 2007.
I've now managed to use the menu options to create the nested fieldcode statement. This runs without giving any error message, creates a box for the picture but doesn't get as far as actually putting in the picture. Instead I get the little red X in the top left corner.
Still trying!
