How to Use Mail Merge with Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine

Summary

For reminder letters and other communications to groups of employees, the program will produce a label file that can be used with your Word Processing program for mail merging to produce the labels.

These directions are long and seemingly complicated. However, you will definitely find that this task is more easily done than said! You may wish to PRINT this topic prior to starting your mail merge. If so, first expand all the steps below, then click the PRINT icon at the top of the Help window.

You may occasionally want to send special correspondence to a group of employees that is NOT a standard communication for which you would use the Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine Letters and List function. You may also want to produce a set of labels to use on envelopes for letters generated from the software. Both these types of output can most easily be produced using the standard mail-merge capabilities of word processing programs such as MS Word or WordPerfect. Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine do not include itheir own mail merge capability because MS Word and Word Perfect have already provided this capacity quite well. However, the program will provide the data you need to use the mail merge function properly.

The mail-merge process involves composing a document in your word processing program, such as a letter or a mailing label, and merging it with a data file The file produced by STIX that includes data, such as name, address, city, state, zip, for use in a mail merge procedure. that contains the names and addresses of the target recipients. This data file is an ASCII data file, most commonly used for labels. In many reports, the program provides the ability to automatically create a mail-merge data file, such as address information, file when the report is generated.

The type of label file depends upon the context of the report. For example, most of the clinical reports that contain specific information related to individual employees, and all employee reminder notices, can generate a label file consisting of one record for each employee who appears on the selected report. The employee label file is a comma-delimited ASCII file containing an employee number, social security number, organization or department name, employee name, two address lines, city, state and zip. Note that you will not need to use all this information in your merged document (e.g. letter or labels), but it is included in the file.

In general, if a report or letter setup/request window contains a check box for creating a label file, then you will get a label record for each employee or entity who is included on that report, based on the selection criteria you choose. The type of label file will depend on the type of report you are requesting, and should be obvious. You can name the label file when you run the report, and the label file will be created regardless of whether you actually print the report on a printer.

This topic describes in detail the procedure to follow to generate a set of mailing labels using Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine with your word processor. A similar procedure can be used to generate a set of letters, or any other kind of document instead of labels. The instructions in this example use Microsoft Word, but you can follow similar steps using a different word processor. This topic is intended to provide you a general guide for using Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine with your word processing program. You will need to become facile with your word processor in order to be effective in doing this using your word processing documentation or other resources to handle any other kind of problem with mail merge. Net Health cannot and does not provide technical support for word processing.

Steps to Mail Merge from Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine

1: Create the data file from Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine .

First you must get the data (i.e. names and addresses) out of the Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine database and into a file that the word processing program can read. (The "list" used in this example is the Employee list.)
Select the report or list that you want to merge with the letter or labels.
Click the Print button to begin this process.
Click the checkbox Create label file to pop up a box called ASCII Label File Name.
Either use the file name provided, or change it to put the data into a file of your choosing. However, you must enter the full path name a file name that contains the entire path to the file location. For example, a file called Employee Labels.doc may have a full path name such as C:\My Documents\Label Files\Employee Labels.doc. of the file.
Write down the full path name of the file that is in the box [ASCII File Label Name]. For example, the filename below is FILENAME.txt, and this is how the full path is written:

C:\StixW9\TESTDATA\FILENAME.txt

(This is the data file that will be used in the mail merge.)

Click OK.
If you wish to print the report without previewing it, de-select the Print Preview box. If you do not wish to print the report to the printer, be sure to select the Print Preview box, so that it will print to the screen. After you have previewed the report, you can exit to cancel the report from printing on a printer.
Click OK to generate the report and the label data file.
When finished, click Close.

2: Create the main document (i.e. letter or label template).

(Note: These directions use Word 2000; they may need slight modification for later versions of Word).

Open MS Word.
If not already opened, open a blank document (File/New/Blank document).
From the top menu bar, click Tools, then Mail Merge. You will see the Mail Merge Helper dialogue box with 1, 2, 3 on it.
At #1, Main Document, click Create/Labels (or Form Letters).
Click the Active Window button to make a label template in the document you just opened. Word will create the document "behind the scenes".

3: Add a header record to the data file.

At Mail Merge Helper dialogue box with #2, Data Source, click Get Data, then Open Data Source.
Find the data file named in Step 1, #5. When you get to the folder where the file is, (such as the TESTDATA folder in the example given in Step 2), click the down arrow to the right of the Files of Type field, and select the Text Files (*.txt) option. Then, highlight the file and click Open.
Press the Escape key on your keyboard to close the dialogue box, [Set Up Main Document]. (You need to work on the data file before you can set up the labels document).
Your data file must have a header record. This record defines the field names so that MS Word can recognize the information in the file.

To add a header record to your data file, at the Mail Merge Helper dialogue box with #2, Data Source, click the Edit button, then click the name of the file that you chose above.

In the [Data Form] dialogue box, click the View Source button. You will now be looking at the data file produced by your Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine report, and you should see some data that looks familiar!
On your keyboard, hold down the Ctrl key and press the Home key to go to the very beginning of the file.
Press Enter to create a blank line in the file. This blank line is where you will put the header record.
On the newly-created blank line, type the following sentence EXACTLY as it is here, with no extra spaces. (If you have created an autotext entry - see below - just type in "field names" and press the F3 key. Word will add the field names for you.)

First Name,LastName,Address 1,Address 2,City,State,Zip

Side Bar -First time only: Create an autotext entry to add these fields in the future:

a. Highlight the text you just typed above.

b. Click Insert / Auto Text / New.

c. In the Create AutoText Entry box, type the words "field names" without the quote marks.

d. Click OK. The next time you want to do an employee mail-merge, you can use the autotext feature instead of typing the header record information in step 8 above.

Save the file.

4: Add the Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine fields to the main document template.

At the very top of the screen click Window on the menu bar and select the window with the Main Document in it.
At the top of this document, click Tools, the Mail Merge.
Under #1 in the Mail Merge Helper Dialog Box, click the Setup button. A [Label Options] dialogue box will open.
Under the Product Number field, use the slide bar to find and select the type of label you use.
Click OK.

What you are going to do now is put the fields from Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine in the order you want them to appear on the label.

Click Insert Merge Field.
Find the field FirstName. Highlight and select it.
Back on the label, press the spacebar.
Click Insert Merge Field again. Find the field name LastName. Highlight and select it. Then, press Enter to go to the next line.
Click Insert Merge Field again.
Find the field, Address1. Highlight and select it.
Back on the label, press Enter to go to the next line.
Click Insert Merge Field again.
Continue this process through Address 2, City, State and Zip. Put the fields in the place you want them to appear on the label. Be sure to put a comma ON THE MAIN DOCUMENT between the City and State fields.
If you want to place the Postal Code on the label, click the Insert Postal Code button, and select the Zip field for the first box, and Address 1 for the second box. Click OK.
When you are finished, click OK.

5: Merge the main document and the data file.

Back in the Mail Merge Helper, under #3, click the Merge button. Make sure the following options are selected:

Merge to New Document

Records to be merged: ALL

When merging records: Don't print blank lines when data fields are empty.

If you want to see a few pages of the labels to see how they look, enter the following numbers in the FROM and TO box: FROM: 1 TO: 30. You will then need to change it back to ALL before running the final labels!
Click the Check Errors box, and select the option, Complete merge without pausing. Report errors in a new document. Click OK.
Click the Merge button. Your document or labels will appear on the screen.
Click the Print Preview icon and make sure the pages are properly set up. If you see a problem, first MAKE SURE THAT THE TYPE OF LABEL YOU ARE USING MATCHES THE SETTINGS IN MS WORD.

We strongly recommend that you print a set of labels on plain paper before printing the labels. Look them over to see if there is anything that needs to be corrected in the word processing document before printing on the labels, and if so, go to the document and make the corrections. This will save you from wasting labels, which are more expensive than paper! Review the document and make corrections on the page, then make the corrections in Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine, if needed, and run the merge again.

When you are ready to print the labels, substitute labels for the regular paper.

TO CREATE MERGED LETTERS:

To create merged letters, follow the same process, but instead of setting up labels in your Main Document, set up a letter. Add the fields to the letter where you want them to print on the page (name, address, etc.).