Gerard has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Any advice / comments would be greatly appreciated... Background: I am writing a Win32::Gui application that stores contacts in flat text files and can then regroup certain ones to make a mail merge letter, amongst other things. I know that there are various other applications around to do a similar sort of thing, but Ichose to do this as there was a request for something similar at work and to take the opportunity to learn some perl. As is probably the case with most of you I find it much easier to learn when doing... Anyway, when coming to generate the Word mailmerge documnet - actually I am using an existing file and saving it with another name / location after changing the datasource. All of this works fine with the below code 
 my $datasource="somelocation\\somefile.cdm";
my $savelocation="somelocation\\somefile.doc";
use strict;
use Win32::OLE ;
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Word';
my $Word= Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application', 'Quit');
$Word->Documents->Open($template);
$Word->ActiveDocument->MailMerge->OpenDataSource($datasource,);

$Word->ActiveDocument->SaveAs($savelocation);

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Note: I used *.cdm as the extension as it was recomended to use something that word did not recognise so that it would not automatically assume the field and recorde delimiters. When I do this word brings up a dialog box asking me to select the delimters. "|" for field and "~" for record. Does anyone know how I can tell word what these are and thus avoid this intrusive dialog box? Look forward to hearring your wisdom. Cheers, Gerard.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Win32:OLE and Word Mail Merge
by zakb (Pilgrim) on Oct 16, 2001 at 10:38 UTC

    Word is very picky about datasources for mail merges.

    I've done it before using CSV files by:

    • opening the CSV file using Documents.Open - Word recognises it's a CSV file; used delimiters "," and "<CR>" (no dialog, as these are standard)
    • saving the CSV as a Word document
    • using the Word document as the datasource, specifing it's a Word document in the call to MailMerge.OpenDataSource
    which actually works without any prompts. But, from your quoted delimiters I take it your not using a standard CSV file, so I doubt this would work. If you're opening a file Word does not recognise, I don't think you can get around the Word dialogs at all. Sorry ;).

[reply]
      For anyone that is interested, here is my final conclusion... After much searching it seems that there is no way to dowhat I was trying. The only solution that I have come up with is to read the file, change the delimiters etc. and save it to another file. This works fine but is a little annoying as updates etc. have to be made in more than one place... But hey,... It works and I suppose that is all that really matters.
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      Thanks for the information. Interesting, but doesn't seem to be avoidable as you say. Perhaps someone else will be able to shed some light. I am stumped!
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Re: Win32:OLE and Word Mail Merge
by cacharbe (Curate) on Oct 16, 2001 at 16:32 UTC
    What delimiters are you using? I read the following information about the method:

    ---------------

    OpenDataSource Method
    Syntax:

    expression.OpenDataSource(Name, Format, ConfirmConversions, ReadOnly, LinkToSource, AddToRecentFiles, PasswordDocument, PasswordTemplate, Revert, WritePasswordDocument, WritePasswordTemplate, Connection, SQLStatement, SQLStatement1)

    expression Required. An expression that returns a MailMerge object.

    Name Required String. The data source file name. You can specify a Microsoft Query (.qry) file instead of specifying a data source, a connection string, and a query string.

    Format Optional Variant. The file converter used to open the document. Can be one of the following WdOpenFormat constants: wdOpenFormatAllWord, wdOpenFormatAuto, wdOpenFormatDocument, wdOpenFormatEncodedText, wdOpenFormatRTF, wdOpenFormatTemplate, wdOpenFormatText, wdOpenFormatUnicodeText, or wdOpenFormatWebPages. The default value is wdOpenFormatAuto.

    To specify an external file format, use the OpenFormat property with a FileConverter object to determine the value to use with this argument.

    ---------------

    Can you tell me the format of the file you are using (Your node mentions "|" and "~" but I wasn't sure that this was the case)? I'll then try to create a working example.

    C-.

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Re: Win32:OLE and Word Mail Merge
by drinkd (Pilgrim) on Oct 16, 2001 at 16:54 UTC
    No way to do it? Sounds like a challenge :-). I can think of a couple of ways. I have had luck doing automated delimited parsing using the VBA macros in Word and Excel. Then you could automate the macro from Win32:OLE. Have you tried just sending the necessary keystrokes with Win32::CtrlGUI ? I have never tried this, and it seems kind of a kludge, but it might do the trick if there isn't other window activity going at the same time. drinkd
[reply]
      In reply to the above two... I had thought of using Win32::CtrlGUI but haven't done so before. (Not that that is any reason not to) I just thought that it was quite likely to get rather ugly. Thanks for your information, I also found the same / similar information last night and this is actually what led me to my conclusion. Bearing in mind that I am new to all this... Anyway I can change the format to standard csv and this works fine... just not ideal for what I wanted. I would be interested in any solutions where I can use my existing delimiters | and ~ .
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