MS Word question - standard letters

[Halfmad]

I've just had my business manager ask me this, essentially we have standard documents they staff use to send to parents. Problem is that staff are messing up the formatting and essentially sending out garbage to parents.

 

What he's wanting is some way of having a box in the documents which teacher fill in with the details. At the moment we have:

 

As you know PUPIL NAME has been studying SUBJECT at LEVEL. His/her performance has been at a level that would suggest PUPIL NAME is unlikely to achieve a pass at level.

 

It looks awful as staff leave all the text underlined - the person who made the letters only did that so it was easy to spot what you had to edit out.

 

Any suggestions? essentially we need the pupil name etc to be highlighted in some way, but when printed etc it looks the same as the rest. My initial thought was to do them in red, as most of us use mono printers but I'm sure I've seen it down using grey boxed areas before.

 

I rarely get a chance to use word - hence me asking for help

[Geoff]

You need to create a form template. Here's how:

 

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP052302701033.aspx

[russdev]

We have simple way to make sure letters that look like garbage don't go out.

 

All letters to parents and general any member of public have to be approved by the head.

[Domino]

are you a SIMS user?

 

I've made a letter template in SIMS that plonks all the data in from a report.

 

Can choose a whole year, or class, or individual student depending on the letter, and staff have no input with formatting at all.

[enjay]

Could you create a mail merge process, so they enter the names into a table in a document, and then click a button which runs a macro driving the merge process. The teacher types "John" "Art" "GCSE" and clicks 'go', then a moment later, a beautiful letter comes out the printer.

[Halfmad]

Sadly (or not) we don't use SIMS!

 

Geoff - that'll do nicely, cheers!

 

Nick - that's too complicated, trust me. We're trying to keep it at simply as possible. I'd considered mail merge but my boss just laughed and pointed out that most staff can barely select a printer..

[Halfmad]

We have simple way to make sure letters that look like garbage don't go out.

 

All letters to parents and general any member of public have to be approved by the head.

 

I was surprised that this wasn't the case, but apparently they only have to go through the department heads then office staff will send anything.

 

Problem is that each department has it's own letters, most of which are absolutely awful. I've even spotted a few glaring gramatical errors in the standard letter our English department were using.

[enjay]

Nick - that's too complicated, trust me. We're trying to keep it at simply as possible. I'd considered mail merge but my boss just laughed and pointed out that most staff can barely select a printer..

Hence the suggestion of a macro to run the mail merge - all the teachers would need to do is click one button.

[Halfmad]

Yes but I'm willing to be they'd never be able to find it

 

I'll have a look into it anyway, see if I can make one monster button with "click me" written on it for them