Word 2002- how to mailmerge scanned in addresses

When you scan a document you get an image of the whole page; you don't get the
individual addresses in a list. To get a list you would at least need some type
of Optical Character Recognition software and at best would still need to do a
lot of editing. Are you lucky enough that the addresses are in a table in each
doc? If so you can do a little research to find out how to import data from a
Word table to Access. I would also investigate where the addresses came from to
get on the doc; maybe there's another source from which you can import.

--
PC Datasheet
Your Resource For Help With Access, Excel And Word Applications

www.pcdatasheet.com


"humblejohn" wrote in message
om...
my boss wants me to take 80 8.5 X 11 sheets with addresses and use
them as the basis for a mailing using mailmerge. Do this require lots
of programming jibberish or can this be done fairly easily? Can these
sheets be scanned into a word file and then used in a merge. This guy
seems to think i invented mail merge. Thanks in
advance.

Hi John,

If the 80 sheets have the addresses in rows and columns like a sheet of
mailing labels, it can be pretty difficult to separate them out once
scanned. Life is vastly easier if they are in a single column.

A lot depends on the print quality on the sheets, and also on your
scanner and OCR software. If the latter (a) recognises the text
accurately and (b) recognises the layout of the addresses and renders it
as (e.g.) a Word table or Excel sheet, things aren't too bad: just
re-arrange the Word or Excel data so there's a single column of
consistently formatted addresses, and it will be possible to use them
for a mailmerge.

If on the other hand the OCR software makes a mess of the layout - using
odd tabs and spaces to separate addresses that are level with each other
on the page - it requires lots of big programming juju to sort it out,
and you'll probably do better to either cut the sheets into single
columns and scan those, or even pay someone to re-type the data.



On 6 Jul 2004 14:12:46 -0700, (humblejohn) wrote:

my boss wants me to take 80 8.5 X 11 sheets with addresses and use
them as the basis for a mailing using mailmerge. Do this require lots
of programming jibberish or can this be done fairly easily? Can these
sheets be scanned into a word file and then used in a merge. This guy
seems to think i invented mail merge. Thanks in
advance.

--
John Nurick [Microsoft Access MVP]

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