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Word 2013 vs Word 2016 for Conditional Word Merges

Susan Raymer

Anyone know if there is a difference between how Word 2013 and Word 2016 processes conditional mail merges? I set set up the conditional merge doc on my computer with Word 2013. I got all all the bugs out and reformatted the letter templates to match. Tested , looked good to go. Then I made up a new merge doc. for the data entry person with the particular path for her computer and then sent it to her. I was loaded on her Word 2016 software, tested a merge and it worked but all the dates at the top of each letter were bolded. No idea why, it is not in the templates and not in the merge doc. I looked. Only difference is the version of Word itself. Anybody else have to use 2 different versions of Word and run into the same problem? I had great success with having the box of perserve formatting checked in my original run and so left it checked for the 2016 version as well. Thanks much!

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Comments

Austen Brown

Hi @Susan Raymer - Have you tried unchecking the “Perserve formatting” on the 2016 version? Or, perhaps removing “\\* MERGEFORMAT” from the conditional statements within your merge doc?

Susan Raymer

Hi Austen. Thanks for the suggestion. I had already gone through and reconfirmed that the preserve format and therefore \\*MERGEFORMAT was on each conditional statement. So, currently all the bold formatting is gone, even where we want it to be. I may go back in and indivdually on each statement uncheck preserve format, save and then go back in and recheck preserve format and save. I did that on my Word 2013 earlier in the process when I had some issues and it cleared them up. Not sure it will work for Word 2016, but will try anyways. Nothing else is different between the merge document and the templates. I have tried replacing MERGEFORMAT with CHARFORMAT and nothing happened. It did not resolve the issue. One thing I might try is to put the text blocks where the bold text is in each template into a text box. Text boxes seem to retain the format within them. Lot of extra work though, we have lots of templates. But at least the letters are working on a consistent level so far, despite the need to tweak them. Thanks again, really appreciate the feedback!

Susan L. Raymer, Lighthouse MI