Hey all,

I have been tasked with figuring out a way to automate a form letter process that currently is done mostly by hand with a lot of copy/paste. We have letters that need to get sent out based on our internal system. Someone now looks up the items in the system, inputs the information into a form letter and mails it. That's the simple version.

I need to create a program whereby they can pull the information from the database and then choose the specific form letter (or combination of multiples) that they want to send and have it populate the letter with other information from the database.

While this shouldn't be too difficult for you pro's - I'm still a Jr in programming.

Question is:
Anyone have any guidance/direction about where to begin?
I saw something about Form Letter Report Expert that uses Crystal Reports but I don't have that program...

so you want to do a mail merge in effect, why not use office?

I thought it was more than a mail merge, fields I need to merge are in our database based on a contract table, a customer table, and a claims table. I didn't think all that was possible with mail merge . . .

I can check further into it, I saw some of that.

<name and address> from customer
<contract info> from contract table

base of form letter with <claim info> inserted into it

Collect the data you want from however many sources you need to collect from, and place it in a single place (such as a CSV file) and merge.

Thanks LizR - this will work perfectly for what I need to do.