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From: rlcollins@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (Ryan 'Gozar' Collins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Atariwriter Rules! (Or "How to do Mail-merge with Atariwriter!")
Message-ID: <4742.28007659@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu>
Date: 8 Apr 91 18:55:37 GMT
Lines: 53

I was at my girlfriends house this past weekend helping her send out 
letters for applications. (She's graduating in August) Anyway, she has me 
old 800xl, which she uses to type her papers and send E-mail to me. (Since 
we're 120 miles aprt) Anyway, we needed to address 77 different envelopes 
and 77 different personalized letters with Atariwriter. I had remembered an 
undocumented feature of Atariwriter in an old Antic in which Atariwriter 
could do some sort of mail merge. But I didn't have the magazine with me, 
so I had to figure it out on my own. Here it is:

	o Create you form letter (envelope):
		1. In your top line with the formatting commands, add the 
<cntrl>W if your are doing single sheets and want it to pause after each 
page.
		2. Put an <OPTION><INSERT> whenever you wanted to bring new 
information into the letter (envelope), just like it says in the manual for 
form printing.

	o Create a file with the information you want merged in your letter 
(envelope). For the envelope we wanted to add addresses so the file looked
like this: 

The ABC Company
Mr. Webster, President
123 Alpha Way
Nowhere, USA 12345
				<--- I had a space in here in case an
The ABC Company			     address had five lines, it also helped
Mr. Webster, President		     readability of the file. Just be sure
123 Alpha Way			     in you form letter (envelope) you have 
Nowhere, USA 12345		     five lines.

	o Save that and load in your form letter (envelope). Load you
printer with paper (or an envelope) and print your form letter (envelope).
When 
Atariwriter says:
Make Entry, Press RETURN

press <cntrl>V and then enter the filename.ext of you information file. 
Atariwriter won't give you any indication that you did this correctly, but 
after you enter the filename, it will get the file off of disk, and put the 
information in place of the <OPTION><INSERT>s. For the number of copies, 
you must specify how many different sets of information is in you file. You 
can't just start printing from the middle of your information file.

This worked perfectly, much better than I would have ever thought it would, 
and it did it just as well as my ST could've. This just goes to show that 
the 8bits aren't dead, and will probably be around for a lot longer!
	
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Ryan 'Gozar' Collins 	  Question for MAC Users:      rlcollins@miavx1.BITNET
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