Microsoft Word Mail Merge

I no longer actively teach, but I continue to use Classmaker for all sorts of things.  It's been used as a rudimentary cashbook, a holiday diary, for Cub and Scout planning and lately as a document management program in my electrical business. Today it's been successfully implemented as a data source for Microsoft Word's mail merge.

As an electrician, I'm required to supply every customer with a official document called a Certificate of Compliance (CoC) when doing electrical work.  Until recently, these forms have been sold in triplicate books of twenty.  A form was completed manually, whenever new electrical wiring was done on a job and a copy posted to the customer.  The yellow copy of the triplicate had to be retained for three years.

The world moves on and now we are allowed to create electronic versions of this form, but they must be stored for seven years rather than three years. Furthermore the CoC has been renamed to a Compliance and Electrical Safety Certificate (CESC) and one must be supplied for all electrical work.  The Electrical Workers Registration Board (EWRB) created a new version of the CESC using Adobe PDF, but their PDF made completing a CESC more onerous than the old manual method, because I had no way of automatically populating the PDF's fields and typing is much slower than writing.

I felt that unless this new electronic method could deliver the following benefits there was no point having it:

1.  The form had to be much quicker to fill out than before and avoid any re-typing of existing information.
2.  The form had to be easy to store and retrieve in future with no chance of it being misplaced or the information originally supplied on the form being changed accidentally.
3. The form had to be capable of being both emailed and printed.
4. The form template had to be able to be edited in future as the legislation and/or my business changed.
5. The form had to be able to go multi-page if the certified design for the installation was large.

The EWRB PDF form delivered on points 2 and 3, but failed miserably on points 1, 4 and 5.

Based on my previous efforts with Classmaker and Microsoft Word mail merge, it seemed to me that I could deliver on all five points above by doing the following:

1.  Recreate the EWRB CESC form in Microsoft Word and pre-populate all the fields that will never change in the Word document, including my signature.
2.  Use some of the fields in Classmaker as fields on the CESC form.
3.  Print the Lesson Plan in Classmaker to HTML file.
4.  Use mail merge to populate the CESC form with variable data from the HTML file.
5.  Print the CESC form as a PDF.
6.  Save the PDF back into Classmaker as a file attachment.

Once I decided to recreate the EWRB CESC form from scratch in Microsoft Word, the rest of the process proceeded quite smoothly and after a morning's work I had a presentable CESC.

Instead of typing out a CESC all I have to do is cut and paste a customer's address and contact details from GNUCash, my accounting package, into Classmaker. Nothing else is duplicated and due to my CESC form's ability to go multi-page the certified design description can be much more detailed than is possible on the EWRB PDF.

Once again Classmaker has proved to be a decent jack of all trades due to:

1.  It's ability to write out it's reports underlying recordsets to HTML tables, one table per report.  The HTML table retains CRLF's but removes all other formatting enabling me to cleanly separate data from presentation.
2.  It's ability to store file attachments inside the database. I've only got to worry about backing up one Classmaker database file for my business.  Everything I need is stored in there.
3.  In the future, if I have to retrieve a CESC, it will be no problem.  Either I type in any part of the customer's address as a search key inside Classmaker, or I export the whole lot to disk and use Windows Search to find what I want.
4.  Having multiple users inside the same database with different subjects for each.  Decided to create a new user from today for my electronic CESC's.  Having many different users is no hardship, because Classmaker remembers the id of the last one you used and opens up with those settings when you restart it.
5.  Classmaker's automatic information aging using it's calendar screens, you only see the current information you are working on - older information automatically disappears.