rlcollins@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (Ryan 'Gozar' Collins) (04/09/91)
I was at my girlfriends house this past weekend helping her send out
letters for applications. (She's graduating in August) Anyway, she has me
old 800xl, which she uses to type her papers and send E-mail to me. (Since
we're 120 miles aprt) Anyway, we needed to address 77 different envelopes
and 77 different personalized letters with Atariwriter. I had remembered an
undocumented feature of Atariwriter in an old Antic in which Atariwriter
could do some sort of mail merge. But I didn't have the magazine with me,
so I had to figure it out on my own. Here it is:
o Create you form letter (envelope):
1. In your top line with the formatting commands, add the
<cntrl>W if your are doing single sheets and want it to pause after each
page.
2. Put an <OPTION><INSERT> whenever you wanted to bring new
information into the letter (envelope), just like it says in the manual for
form printing.
o Create a file with the information you want merged in your letter
(envelope). For the envelope we wanted to add addresses so the file looked
like this:
The ABC Company
Mr. Webster, President
123 Alpha Way
Nowhere, USA 12345
<--- I had a space in here in case an
The ABC Company address had five lines, it also helped
Mr. Webster, President readability of the file. Just be sure
123 Alpha Way in you form letter (envelope) you have
Nowhere, USA 12345 five lines.
o Save that and load in your form letter (envelope). Load you
printer with paper (or an envelope) and print your form letter (envelope).
When
Atariwriter says:
Make Entry, Press RETURN
press <cntrl>V and then enter the filename.ext of you information file.
Atariwriter won't give you any indication that you did this correctly, but
after you enter the filename, it will get the file off of disk, and put the
information in place of the <OPTION><INSERT>s. For the number of copies,
you must specify how many different sets of information is in you file. You
can't just start printing from the middle of your information file.
This worked perfectly, much better than I would have ever thought it would,
and it did it just as well as my ST could've. This just goes to show that
the 8bits aren't dead, and will probably be around for a lot longer!
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