Mail Merge: Multiple OR and AND

Rich Goldberg 161 Reputation points
2024-01-19T20:47:52.4166667+00:00

I've searched but can't find a solution to this issue. (I found lots of complaints about NOT BLANK, but that doesn't apply here.) I have a mail merge using an XLSX spreadsheet, and it has worked for years. Each month I send out letters to people with an event in that month. My spreadsheet has a column named "Squelch" which is True if the letter is not to be sent at all. It will be True if the street name or city name is empty, etc. The standard filter for the merge is something like Month Equal to Sep -AND- Squelch Equal to False. This month I need to send out two months' worth in one batch. So I changed the filter to Month Equal to Sep -OR- Month Equal to Oct -AND- Squelch Equal to False. The filter gives me all the Sep and Oct items, ignoring the Squelch condition completely. Thinking that the order of the conditions is significant, I changed it to Squelch Equal to False AND Month Equal to Sep -OR- Month Equal to Oct, but the results are the same. I think I'll temporarily add a new column to the spreadsheet to compute whether to use a line for the merge, then have the merge check only that field. But I'd sure like to know if I'm doing something wrong, or is there a real issue with Word's mail merge.

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A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
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A suite of Microsoft productivity software that supports common business tasks, including word processing, email, presentations, and data management and analysis.
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