Deciding what information should be sent to Word
In CMS go to Reports>Batch>Letter & Receipts and check the ‘Combine multiple payments in a single letter / Year End Letter’ check box.

In the ‘General’ tab

• You can limit to Letters that have not been sent yet by leaving the ‘Not been sent yet’ checkbox checked.
  Important: for year-end letters, uncheck this. (Year-end letters include ALL payments, regardless if you already sent the donor a letter).
• You can also limit to only those payments that you requested should get a letter/receipt – ‘GetReceipts’ checkbox.
• For year-end letters, limit the ‘Date Range’ on the bottom left to ‘previous year’ or ‘current year’.
• You can also limit to certain categories and/or subcategories on the ‘Category’ tab, and other options on the ‘Other’ tab

 

Getting the information to MS Word
Click ‘OK’, and a window will come up asking you whether you’d like to work from an existing template/document or create a new document from scratch. In this tutorial we’ll be demonstrating only the first option to ‘Create a new Word Document (based on a Template)’.
Click the ‘Select Template’ button to select your template.
Important: the template to be selected is not your regular ‘Thank You’ letter template. You need to select the Template that has the <MultiLine> and <TotalAmount> fields (see below).

If you did not setup your personalized Template, chose our sample Template from C:\ Chabad Management System\ Sample Templates. Here is where we store our sample templates.
Click on ‘Multi TYletter.dot’ and click open. Now click ‘OK’.

 

Working with the template in Word
Everything you’ll need to know is on the ‘Mail Merge toolbar’ (pictured below). If you’re using Word 2007, Click Mailings for similar functions (images are different).

The third icon  ‘Mail Merge Recipients’ is all the information that CMS sent to MS Word. By clicking on this icon you can view all the people that are included in this merge, you can also sort the merge and even exclude recipients from the merge.
You’ll notice that you don’t see your CMS information in the word document; rather you see the CMS fields (which you can insert by clicking the 'Insert Merge Fields'  button). To toggle between the ‘live data’ and the ‘merge fields’ click on the ‘View Merged Data’  button.
Then use the navigation to navigate through the letters.

The final step in the merge would be to ‘Merge to Printer’ or ‘Merge to New Document’. (The regular ‘print’ will only print the record that is being displayed).

Preparing a Word Template
As stated above, the resulting Mail Merge Document gets the information that CMS sends it. In order for the Document to work properly, the Template needs to have the proper fields. An example of the fields you would use in the Template would be:

• <Name>
• <Address>
• <City>, <State> <ZipCode>
• <Dear>
• <TotalAmount>
• <MultiLine>

These fields are typed as plain text into the Template. When CMS creates a new document based on the Template, the fields are converted into Mail Merge fields.

 

MultiLine field and Tabs.
Of all the fields mentioned, the <MultiLine> field is the most interesting. It includes a tab-separated list of the donations with several fields (Date, Amount, etc.). For the list to be displayed in neat columns, Tab stops should be used. You can set the Tab stop positions and alignment for the paragraph that displays
the <MultiLilne> field by clicking Format > Tabs.

The sample template demonstrates the use of Tabs as well.