WD: Conditional MERGEFIELD Lost When Converted to MacWord

ID: Q165635

The information in this article applies to:

SYMPTOMS

When you save a mail merge main document containing conditional MERGEFIELD statements as a Word for the Macintosh 4.0 or 5.x document, the information in the conditional MERGEFIELD statement is lost.

WORKAROUND

Re-create the conditional MERGEFIELD statement after you open the mail merge main document in Word.

NOTE: You may need to reattach the data document when you open the mail merge main document.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

The conversion process does not correctly handle the conditional MERGEFIELD statement. For example, if the statement in Word for Windows is 

   {IF {MERGEFIELD LastName}="Jones" "yes" "no"}
the same statement after opening the converted document in Word for the Macintosh 5.1 would appear as: 

   <<IF=>><<ENDIF>>
When you reopen the converted document back into Word, the conditional MERGEFIELD statement shows as: 

   Word 7.0, Word 97
   -----------------

      {IF= "" ""}

   Word 6.0
   --------

      { MERGEFIELD LastName }=Jonesyesno
Additional query words: conditional print constructs field 8.0 8.00 
Keywords          : kbinterop wordnt word8 kbfield winword kbmerge ntword macword word6 word7 word95 
Version           : WINDOWS:6.0,6.0a,6.0c,7.0,7.0a
Platform          : WINDOWS
Issue type        : kbbug

Last Reviewed: December 23, 1998