quotation marks within a conditional

Celest Couch

I'm creating a document with multiple nested if...then....else statements.  My text within one of the "then" statements contains quotation marks.  Word is reading these quotation marks as part of the fields rather than as text.  Does anyone know how I can fix this?

 Thanks in advance for your help!

Grace Strother

Celest Couch:

I'm creating a document with multiple nested if...then....else statements.  My text within one of the "then" statements contains quotation marks.  Word is reading these quotation marks as part of the fields rather than as text.  Does anyone know how I can fix this?

 Thanks in advance for your help!

Hi Celest. According to a Knowledgebase article on Microsoft's website, you can place a backslash (\\) before each quotation mark you want to show in your letter. I hope this helps!

Celest Couch

Grace Strother:

Hi Celest. According to a Knowledgebase article on Microsoft's website, you can place a backslash (\\) before each quotation mark you want to show in your letter. I hope this helps!

Unfortunately, that solution only applies to much earlier versions of Word than I'm using (6.x to 95, IIRC).  I should have thought to specify that I'm using 2010.  Thanks for giving it a shot, though.  I appreciate that I've got some backup out there!

Grace Strother

Celest Couch:

Unfortunately, that solution only applies to much earlier versions of Word than I'm using (6.x to 95, IIRC).  I should have thought to specify that I'm using 2010.  Thanks for giving it a shot, though.  I appreciate that I've got some backup out there!

I found an article that suggested a work-around involving bookmarks and quote fields, but I couldn't get them to work for the same reason including quotes in conditional statements doesn't work.

The article got me thinking of a somewhat inelegant work-around. It's not perfect because it involves adding a whole column to your data file, but it might get the job done for you. I added a column called Quote to the end of my data file and populated all the rows with a double quotation mark. In the Word document, I inserted that merge field into my conditional statement where the quotation mark needed to appear. Let me know if you need any more information than what I provided. I hope this idea helps!

Celest Couch

Grace Strother:
I found an article that suggested a work-around involving bookmarks and quote fields, but I couldn't get them to work for the same reason including quotes in conditional statements doesn't work.

The article got me thinking of a somewhat inelegant work-around. It's not perfect because it involves adding a whole column to your data file, but it might get the job done for you. I added a column called Quote to the end of my data file and populated all the rows with a double quotation mark. In the Word document, I inserted that merge field into my conditional statement where the quotation mark needed to appear. Let me know if you need any more information than what I provided. I hope this idea helps!

Wow, that's a heck of a workaround!  I'm working from within a donor acknowledgement letter mailing, so I don't see any way to add another column to my data file or I'd give it a shot.  It sounds pretty nifty.

 In all honesty, it's simply not enough of a big deal for both of us to be putting this much time and effort into it.  It's just a simple phrase that we wanted to offset, so I used italics instead.  I very much appreciate your being willing to help, though, as well as your creative solution!

Grace Strother

Celest Couch:

Wow, that's a heck of a workaround!  I'm working from within a donor acknowledgement letter mailing, so I don't see any way to add another column to my data file or I'd give it a shot.  It sounds pretty nifty.

 In all honesty, it's simply not enough of a big deal for both of us to be putting this much time and effort into it.  It's just a simple phrase that we wanted to offset, so I used italics instead.  I very much appreciate your being willing to help, though, as well as your creative solution!

Ha, I'm glad you were able to do what you needed to do with italics. You piqued my curiosity with the question, and my reaction as I looked into it was, "Seriously? There really isn't a way to do this???" Ah well, now we know what to do in case we ever have to use italics in a conditional statement.