Footers appearing in acknowledment letters all of a sudden

Joanne Felci 2 · September 2016

Hello!

We have not changed our version of RE or Office but a few months back footers started appearing in our acknowledgement letters when we use the Mail Merge function.

The letter template does not have a footer

When we merge the letter from individual gifts it is not showing a footer

Anyone every experience this and what did you do to fix it?

I'm attaching an example of what I mean

Joanne

Amy Dana · September 2016

Joanne Felci:

Hello!

We have not changed our version of RE or Office but a few months back footers started appearing in our acknowledgement letters when we use the Mail Merge function.

The letter template does not have a footer

When we merge the letter from individual gifts it is not showing a footer

Anyone every experience this and what did you do to fix it?

I'm attaching an example of what I mean

Joanne

Well, that's bizzarre. Could somebody have changed a template in Word? Does it happen on all work stations or just yours?

Joanne Felci 2 · September 2016

I spent some time on Thursday chatting with support and we could not figure out what was going on

First I checked every letter in the merge (it was a conditional merge) but none had that footer

Then I moved the letters I needed to the top of the list and the footer disappeared

who knows?! Strange and annoying though

Jenna Anderson 2 · September 2016

Joanne Felci:

I spent some time on Thursday chatting with support and we could not figure out what was going on

First I checked every letter in the merge (it was a conditional merge) but none had that footer

Then I moved the letters I needed to the top of the list and the footer disappeared

who knows?! Strange and annoying though

Joanne-

We had this same problem too! I had added a footer to two of our letters that we merge (Stock TY's), but then I didn't like them so I deleted them. However, after deleting the footers they would still show up in the merged letters even though I had deleted them. I cannot delete them from the templates either because they don't show up then. Weird. I assumed I would just have to do what you did and re-do them altogether to solve this problem.

I had toyed with the idea of contacting Support about, but figured they wouldn't be able to help.

Gracie Schild · September 2016

Hi - I've posted before about this problem - it drove me NUTS the first year I was working on it. The "move to the top of the list" solution is kind of a last-resort/voodoo thing suggested to me by our trainer/consultant, and no one knows exactly why it works.

What I did find out through bitter experience is that it's not enough to just fix a letter in the conditional merge list in RE, return to the list and then save the whole letter file. You MUST do the merge and send it all the way out to some spot on your computer or network, or the changes won't stick! How many times have I added a new letter and then "just" saved the file without actually doing the merge - and then ended up typing it all in again! I now do the merge after each letter, save from the set-up tabs of the letter file, then go back in and start the next letter. It's slow, but I've never had the phantom changes problem when I take the time to do that. Our issue was margin formatting and it was a nightmare to have to fix 20 letters individually in Word - some had regular margins, some had double, and some had a random combination of the two. At some point, I simply started all over again and entered all the letters again (about a dozen) with the new branding requirements for margins. We've been using that for 3 years now and have never had a problem. Give that a try!

Footers appearing in acknowledment letters all of a sudden

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