Macro to merge Excel information and Word documents?

Hi,

I used these forums a couple of years ago and found the people here to be totally invaluable - and I appreciated it so much, I'm back here again with another quandary!

I'm trying to work out how I can combine a single (Office 2010) Excel spreadsheet with a pair of Word documents (A and B) - and the structure is as follows:

The Excel workbook contains the names of individuals and a host of other information about them, including addresses, other personal info, and a unique code for a specific paragraph from a paragraph 'bank' held in Doc A - although each paragraph in the bank has multiple "*********" placeholders where an individual's name should go (so the information is personalised - this has historically been done through Find/Replace, but I'm trying to find a way to automate it).

Doc B contains a series of A4 forms which contain all the names in the XLS workbook (in the same order) - these forms are, however, empty of information, and need to be filled with the relevant paragraph created through combining the XLS book and Doc A.

Is it possible to create a macro/merge to do the following:

1. Look up the unique code for each individual in the Excel workbook, and create the appropriate paragraph somewhere, inserting the name of the individual in the "*******" placeholders.
2. Once it has done this - merge each complete paragraph into Doc B in the appropriate A4 form (there are normally around 20-40 separate pages in each document)?

It's possible that is most effectively done as two separate operations (I just don't know!) - but I'm trying to reduce the manual element of the process as much as possible! I've attached extremely basic examples of the XLS book and both Word documents to show you what I mean - what the input is, and what the output should look like, after a fashion. Is this possible to recreate easily?

I'll confess to being a little more up-to-date with Excel than with using Mail Merge, to which I am fairly new! However, any suggestions would be massively appreciated.

(As a note, if it is easier to make the paragraph 'bank' in Doc A an Excel spreadsheet, I am more than happy to do so!)

Hi, snb,

Many thanks for the quick reply - and I'm going to look a bit more stupid again in a second, but I've never used document variables before. How

Am I right in thinking I'd need to put all the paragraphs and their codes into another Excel worksheet to do a VLOOKUP on, then do a Find/Replace to replace the ******* placeholders with the unique first name in each row before I can even think about exporting to the report Word document?