Changes occurring in Mail merge formatting

JoAnn Strommen

I saw a post in the 7.94 topic on this but wondering if others who have not updated have noticed a problem with mail merge document font, spacing, changes.  We are not hosted and have not updated to 7.94.  We are still on 7.93.  However, I'm finding changes in font size in the mail merge documents that I used yesterday and today. Haven't seen line spacing problems yet but letter text and merge fields are coming in at differing sizes where before they were all the same.  Yesterday, I first thought I was imagining it, then looked at font size and they were .5 different.  Expereience same thing this morning and left margin not straight/aligned.



Here's link to original post under 7.94: https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/184/15673?post_id=49429#p49429



Is it possible MS Office did an update that's causing issue for RE? 

Mark Guncheon 2

We had that same problem two weeks ago. It is solved by a Microsoft patch. From our IT people when they figured this out:



Ok, that confirms my suspicion.  Microsoft has reported that the Windows patches from February have, in some instances, caused some fonts to not display properly.  Production had those patches from February on them which explains why they were displaying the way that they were.  Test has the March patches on it, which has a patch to fix the broken font patch.





Hope this helps.



Mark

Mark Guncheon 2

This is a Microsoft
problem. Here is a note from our Citrix IT people when they figured
this out:

 

Ok, that confirms
my suspicion.  Microsoft has reported that the Windows patches
from February have, in some instances, caused some fonts to not
display properly.  Production had those patches from February
on them which explains why they were displaying the way that they
were.  Test has the March patches on it, which has a patch to
fix the broken font patch.

 

 

Hope this
helps.

 

Mark C.
Guncheon

Development
IT Analyst

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Valerie Weddell

We are hosted and still seeing this problem. Considering when this was last commented on, you would think this patch would have been put into place for all users by now. I'm wondering if this has happened again post patch or if others are experiencing it?



Thanks!

John Heizer

Valerie Weddell:

We are hosted and still seeing this problem. Considering when this was last commented on, you would think this patch would have been put into place for all users by now. I'm wondering if this has happened again post patch or if others are experiencing it?



Thanks!

Hi,



It's a patch for Word, not for RE.  If Word is running on your local machine (which is my understanding even for those that are hosted ... we aren't) the patch needs to be installed there, not on Blackbaud servers.

Valerie Weddell

Thanks John, I understand that it is a microsoft patch, my thought is that they would have had a wide release on this patch by now to all users (RE users or not) as this was being discussed back in April. So I'm wondering if this is a new iteration of the issue or if perhaps that patch was never widely released. 

Valerie Weddell

Any chance anyone who has done this upgrade from Microsoft knows what the KB # is?

Gracie Schild

Hi - I'm not sure what the initial issue was for you, but we went through all kinds of problems setting up conditional mail merges in Mail.  The answer I got was that it was Word's fault, but that doesn't solve the problem for me.  We're also up to Office 2013 now, and RE still exports in Excel 97-2000 or something like that, but that's a different rant for a different thread!  My super trainer/consultant gave me a couple tips on the formatting issues and I'll pass them on here:



1. If you're having frequent formatting problems in merging batch information into Word letters through Mail, you might have to start over with the letters.  Whenever I start over (yuck) I start with the page formatting before I do anything else, especially margins and line spacing and font size.  DO NOT copy and paste text into the nicely laid out page - type from scratch.  Sometimes copy and paste works, and sometimes it just doubles margins on you.  



2. After you create or change a letter in the conditional mail merge file, run it all the way out to Word.  Just "saving" it in RE will not do the trick.  I set up a dummy batch with one of each letter (unrestricted, scholarship, gift-in-kind, gala sponsorship - whatever) and actually do the merge after every change.  It's very time consuming, but your changes won't save if you didn't do the merge. When you go back to the Mail file, hit the save icon.  Then run the merge again to make further changes or add the next letter, and send it through to Word again.  Takes forever, but I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to do it and had to start over with typing the whole letter (see point 1 about typing from scratch).



3. I know it sounds weird, but if one letter in a conditional mail merge is acting up, move it to the top of the list and try again.  We had about 6 letters in a list and the 4th was always doing double margins.  I moved it to the first spot on the list and the problem went away.



When I first started using Mail merges for our acknowledgement letters in 2012, the voodoo of point 3 held me for a while, but I've created new conditional merge files most years since rather than tweaking old letters, and I've never had any serious problems since.  Hope that helps!



Gracie

Valerie Weddell

Thanks Gracie,



Our issue has been within the receipt files, but we will definitely try your suggestions!



Valerie

John Heizer

Another potential trouble area when documents suddenly change formatting is to check your default printer setup.  If you create a document on one printer then change to another printer the two printers can, potentially, have slightly different "versions" of the exact same font which can throw things off.  Using custom fonts can also cause strange things to happen.



Microsoft Word starts with a default "Normal" style and the builds up any changes from that.  When the "Normal" gets changed it can have a domino effect.  This is particularly evident when you're doing a conditional merge that pulls from multiple "master" Word documents that may have different "Normal" styles.



Then there's the whole \\*MERGEFORMAT \\*Charformat issue that can throw things off (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Insert-and-format-field-codes-in-Word-2010-7e9ea3b4-83ec-4203-9e66-4efc027f2cf3)

Carley Haynes

This may be slightly off topic but has anyone else experienced problems with the mail merge picking up unacknowledged gifts from a subsequent batch? If I commit several batches before conducting a mail merge the first merge I do occassionally picks up acknowledgement letters from subsequent batches if the same constituents are included (Does that make sense?!) So if John Smith is included in batch 15-111 and 15-112 then I run a mail merge on 15-111 two letters for John Smith appear, one from the gift in 15-111 and another from the gift in 15-112 even though I have specified only 15-111 for the mail merge! (phew!)



Anyone got any ideas?! 

John Heizer

Carley Haynes:

This may be slightly off topic but has anyone else experienced problems with the mail merge picking up unacknowledged gifts from a subsequent batch? If I commit several batches before conducting a mail merge the first merge I do occassionally picks up acknowledgement letters from subsequent batches if the same constituents are included (Does that make sense?!) So if John Smith is included in batch 15-111 and 15-112 then I run a mail merge on 15-111 two letters for John Smith appear, one from the gift in 15-111 and another from the gift in 15-112 even though I have specified only 15-111 for the mail merge! (phew!)



Anyone got any ideas?! 

I understand what's happening, but without more information on your Mail setup I can't figure out why it's happening.  We don't specify a particular Batch when doing letters, we just have RE do any Gift that hasn't been already acknowledged.  Are you using the Gift Query created by the Batch as the "Include..." source on the General tab?  What are your settings for the date range, Soft Credits, Matching Gifts? What do you have selected on the Filters and Attributes tabs?

Carley Haynes

John Heizer:

Carley Haynes:

This may be slightly off topic but has anyone else experienced problems with the mail merge picking up unacknowledged gifts from a subsequent batch? If I commit several batches before conducting a mail merge the first merge I do occassionally picks up acknowledgement letters from subsequent batches if the same constituents are included (Does that make sense?!) So if John Smith is included in batch 15-111 and 15-112 then I run a mail merge on 15-111 two letters for John Smith appear, one from the gift in 15-111 and another from the gift in 15-112 even though I have specified only 15-111 for the mail merge! (phew!)



Anyone got any ideas?! 

I understand what's happening, but without more information on your Mail setup I can't figure out why it's happening.  We don't specify a particular Batch when doing letters, we just have RE do any Gift that hasn't been already acknowledged.  Are you using the Gift Query created by the Batch as the "Include..." source on the General tab?  What are your settings for the date range, Soft Credits, Matching Gifts? What do you have selected on the Filters and Attributes tabs?

 

Hi John, 

Thanks for your reply! I have the following set up:

1. General - Include: (Ask query called AK Batch Ask Query), Use gift date, Include all dates, Soft credit Donor, credit matching gifts to Both, include inactive constituents and deceased constituents

2. Fields to include: All

3. Filters: None

4. Gift Types: All except Write offs, recurring gifts

5. Attributes: None

6. Ind. Address: consider addresses with seasonal date as of today, step 2 - preferred (followed by all possible options in order of priority that we use them), Stsep3 nothing, Step4, remove record from run

7. Org. Address: mail only to the organisation, step 2 - same as above, step 3, nothing, step 4 remove record from run

8. Postalsaver - not installed

9. Format : (Shouldn't make any difference to the actual running of the query as far as I'm aware!)



 

Robert Flynn

It would depend upon what parameter you have
set on Bio 2 “Receipt Type.”  “One receipt per gift” or
“consolidated receipts.”

 

One way you could possible alleviate your
problem is to use the query created by your batch post process in
the receipt parameters instead of selecting “all records” under the
“include” button

 

 

Bob

Robert W.
Flynn

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