Letter in Word, Envelope has a REF field to a bookmark, stuff goes haywire

Question

Hello Lords of Word.

This problem takes some describing. I have a word template for a standard letter for my work. There is one of those built in envelopes that you get when you go MAILINGS ribbon > Envelopes > "Add to Document". So the template starts with the built-in envelope, with its preset characteristics. There's a little invisible sort of table or cell for the Delivery address built-in. In that table/cell, I've put in two REF fields that refer to bookmarks for the name and address in the letter, which I'll describe next.

After the envelope page, follows the letter, and in the Letter I put a bookmark called Name and another called Address. Nested inside each bookmark is a formfield. So I hit F11, it jumps to the field inside the "name" bookmark, I fill it in. I hit F11 again, it jumps to the next field, inside the "address" bookmark, and type 2, 3 or 4 lines for the address, hitting enter for a new paragraph between lines.

Final step: Ctrl, A selects the entire doc, I hit F9 to update the REF fields in the envelope, the info in the bookmarks flows into them and my envelope is automatically filled in. This has worked pretty well for years.

Something has started to go wrong, though I've made no changes to my templates. If my Address book mark has a two-line address it all works fine as below:

But if I have a 3-line address (quite common), the 2nd line relocates like this:

I can just move the 2nd line back into place, but this is extra steps, trips me up if I don't notice it,  complicates me training my staff, and I think this might cause big problems with a mail-merge down the road. So I really need to fix it. Any way I can make the REF fields in the Envelope behave themselves?

Thanks in advance. 

ddc

Answer 1

When you enter the address, are you pressing Enter for the second line? If so, does it work if you use Shift+Enter instead?

The box containing the address is a frame, and it is defined as part of the Envelope Address style, which has a large left indent (the only reason for this that I have been able to come up with is that it allows you to remove the indent to add a notation such as PERSONAL, CONFIDENTIAL, or FIRST CLASS to the left above the address). You can, as Graham suggested, modify the Envelope Address style in this template to have no indent; you'll also have to modify the horizontal location setting of the frame to be farther right.

Answer 2

A lot of the problem has to do with the way Word formats envelopes. You can overcome this issue relatively easily by reformatting the EnvelopeAddress paragraph style in the template from which the letter document was created. See http://www.gmayor.com/changing_envelope_layout.htm for instructions.

Answer 3

Thanks for the kind offer--I was able to work it out from some of the other answers.

ddc