Spacing on letters not correct when merging

Melissa Steinbach

Hi Everyone,  I have gone in and set up our donor acknowledgement letters in the wizard and spacing is good.  When I merge my letters it throws the spacing off.  Anyone else have this problem?

Ryan Hyde

Yeah, this is always a little tricky. First, consider that you may be using merge fields that are not populated in your records, such as Address Line 2 and 3. In the template, these lines will take up space, but they may take up no space in the finished product, which could throw off spacing around images and that kind of thing. Secondly, you're likely dealing with different versions of Word (the build in version in RE is a bit old). This can cause some misinterpretations around line breaks and that kind of thing from time to time. When setting up a brand new letter, I typically output a few files directly to my computer to see how things look in the finished product and make adjustments as necessary to the template. It's more of an art that a science. 


However, after doing this for more than 5 years, I have a very good sense of how things are going to look in the final product and it's no longer as irritating as it once was. You'll get there too. 

Phillip Bicknell

I put the Address Block into a Text Box sited In Front of Text and fix it's position against the Page edges to suit a window-envelope, with the text vertically centred. Then I use Returns to fix where the letter content starts. And I only print from a PDF version of the final merge, not the Word version, as the former gives me better print control.


And every single item of text has a Style name that is unique to the specific letter - that way, if different styles are wanted in different letters, they won't pick up from the first letter in the merge.


But then I'm a control freak :-) 

Heather Pauli

One thing to check before you start a merge in Wizard is the actual spacing that is formatted in your Word document, not just how it appears to look. I move my cursor down through a Word document line by line, then under Paragraph on the Formatting Toolbar check that I don't need to remove space before paragraph or remove space after paragraph when I reach a space. I have found that a document sent to me may initially look fine, but when used in a merge it sometimes has incorrect spacing due to another author's formatting.