Posts Tagged ‘automation’
Save time by typing your items in your log sheet and automatically merge the data onto tags!
We have taken the time to carefully format a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and a Microsoft Word document to make this possible and while we have attempted to simplify the process as much as possible and lock the documents to prevent mistakes, this process does require comfortability with using these Microsoft Office programs. The provided docs were configured and saved to work with recent Mac and PC versions of Excel and Word, but we are unable to guarantee operation for your computer and software, nor are we able to provide individual support.
Please read all of the following instructions before attempting. There’s a lot of steps broken out below, but it is really not that difficult of a process. Also, we recommend as a compatibility check that you log no more than 25-35 items, then perform a test merge. If everything worked as you expected, you should have no problem with as many as 200 items.
For those of you not feeling inspired to tackle full automation, feel free to download just the Excel file below for easy tab-thru computer entry of your items for sale. Then at the top of the Tagging Items page, just download either the normal blank Word Doc tag sheet to manually type again your items, or the blank PDF version to write them by hand.
For the adventurous among you…
- Download both the Excel file “MOYC_Merge_Log_2011.XLS” and the Word “MOYC_Merge_Tags_2011.DOC“
- Be sure to save the two files in the same directory
- Open the Excel file first
- At the top of the sheet, replace the 111 consignor number and AAA consignor initials with your own
- Enter your name, address, email, and phone number in the specified fields – from this point on, you should be able to simply tab through the various fields requiring input
- Replace the sample description, size and price with the correct info for Item #1, then proceed to log additional items
- As stated above, once you have 25-35 items logged, we recommend you save the spreadsheet using the same name and do a test merge with the following instructions
- Open the Word file
- Word should automatically recognize the document as configured for merging data and locate the source Excel file if saved in the same directory
- If Word does NOT open some sort of Mail Merge Manager, select Mail Merge from Tools in Word’s menu bar at the top of the screen
- If a Mail Merge Manager or wizard has appeared, but it does NOT list an identified data source, a button should be available to click to Open Data Source and you can then select your saved Excel file
- Assuming step 9 worked fine, or if not you were able to proceed through steps 10 & 11, a dialogue box should appear confirming which worksheet to use, which is ‘Log‘ and a data range, in which you will need to enter A10:G210 (note that you are welcome to replace G210 with the actual last row of your spreadsheet if selling less than 200 items, ex: G83 if selling 73 items)
- A tag template should now appear with a number of cryptic merge fields visible – DO NOT CHANGE – if you accidentally mess something up, either undo or close the file without saving and re-open to start over
- In the Mail Merge Manager, you should see a final step of performing the merge with options to ‘Merge to Printer’ or ‘Merge to A New Document’ – it is suggested that you merge to a new document so you can review the results before printing
- If all looks good, you may now print your tags or close the merged results doc and the template doc (again without saving) and log more items before performing a final merge
- If a lot of blank labels appear, you can either adjust the data range in step 12, or before merging to a new document in step 14 you can specify a custom record range, such as 1 to 92 if you are selling 92 items
