Via:         UK.AC.EX.CEN;  6 NOV 92  9:46:02 GMT
X-Mailer:    ELM [version 2.3 PL0]
Date:         Fri, 6 Nov 92 09:44:09 GMT
From:         M.E.Bennun@CEN.EX.AC.UK
Subject:      Creating a mailmerge file from another wp's data
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.notabene
              92 4:56 pm

M.C. WRIGHT wrote........
>
>
>
> I have plunged into mailmerge (I'm still in version 3.0 of NB) and would
> like to use some information exported from QA4 to make a NB compatible
> list to use with the mailmerge facility.
>
> Is there any way to create a list in NB with data exported from another
> program?  The only way I can find documented in the book is with the
> "Create List" menu, and then I have to rekey in all the data.  Is there
> a better way?


I have done this or something similar for a colleague - it was a few
years ago, and a very large job: all the European Court's decisions
from the year dot to the present - from Wordstar to NB 3. I don't
recall if we needed a mailmerge or column result, but this is not
important because either were equally possible, and I have used
mailmerge files for lurid purposes far removed from mere letters and
envelopes.

It was not especially difficult, just tedious. I wrote an XPL program
after studying the way the other data were laid out, utilising the
fact that similar things occur regularly in such a situation in order
to turn them into other regularly-ocurring things. What made it
tedious was getting the fine-tuning right: I recall that the number of
hard spaces varied in the same fields in different records depending
on the amount of material in the fields, and one had to get rid of
superfluous spaces and insert the delta or para marker or whatever at
exactly the right spot and lose no data. There was no way I was going
to do it manually - life is far too short - or get the great wodge of
material re-keyed, and in the end it worked perfectly.

So it can be done. Get a copy of the customisation guide with its
introduction to programming, and spend an afternoon coming to grips
with elementary XPL.

The really dirty problems arose because of the need to ensure that all
carriage returns and line feeds were turned into proper para markers.
Different typists had worked on the source files at different times
using different versions of Wordstar, and the whole mass had been
converted from C/PM through PRIMOS to MS-DOS so this was quite
exciting at times: sometimes the "<-" markers did not mean what they
said..... Wordstar really is quite primitive....feeding non-standard
papyrus rolls into the disk drives sometimes jammed them.....

So I would say you need to study the source material when you have
inmported it as far as you can into something NB can get onto the
screen for you, and then write an XPL utility to complete the job. I
don't know the package the material is in at present; perhaps others
can point to translation packages which might make it simpler. But
remember that all a mailmerge file is, is fields separated by an
unbreakable space and a para maker, and records separated by a page
eject delta. It's all in ascii (except, of course, the << and >>'s)
and that makes it in principle simple......provided you can get it
into a form which NB can put intelligibly on the screen. Getting the
right translation package, if one exists, might make it even simpler.
 ---------------
Mervyn E. Bennun, Law Department, University of Exeter
Phone: (+44) (0) 392 263 161
Postal Address: Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ, Devon, U.K.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU