Creating a letter in custom reports

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carlwood
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Joined: Tue Feb 02, 2010 11:09 am

Creating a letter in custom reports

Post by carlwood »

What is the best way to create the body of a letter in a custom report. I was hoping for a memo field or something capable of word wrapping. The only method I have found so far is to create a series of labels on the report and make each line of the letter a caption in the different labels. There has to be a better way.

Jeff
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Re: Creating a letter in custom reports

Post by Jeff »

Did you try creating a mailmerge letter in Word? You create mailmerge files in PowerChurch that can then be pulled into Microsoft Word to have it do the merge.

Zorak
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Re: Creating a letter in custom reports

Post by Zorak »

Jeff's suggestion is probably the easiest and best. That gives you formatting tools in Word, rather than being stuck with only the options that the CR Writer has for labels or fields.

If you really, really want to make this a custom report, you can insert a field into the report with the following expression:

Code: Select all

filetostr("myletter.txt")
This would be a text file saved in the PowerChurch Plus program directory. To reference a file anywhere else, you would need a full file path:

Code: Select all

filetostr("C:\Users\Rob\Documents\myletter.txt")
This must be a plain text file, meaning no font formatting or much of anything beyond line breaks is available.

You can read all about that function here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 80%29.aspx

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