Flatten may be too much of an adobe photoshop term, but it accurately encompasses what I’m asking. Another non-Word concept would be Excel’s “paste values” instead of a normal paste.
Basically, I have a form document where names and addresses are pulled out of an excel database. I would like to save one of these form-filled documents as a new Word document, but I want the form fields to be removed and just to have the text in its place.
Is that possible? (This is Word 2007)
convert table to text.
can you elaborate a bit please?
Paste a section of excel cells - this becomes a table in MSword.
Right click on the table. Select convert to text.
Or when pasting into Word, go to Edit->Paste Special, and select “Unformatted Text”
I think I’m not being clear: The excel stuff is through a mail-merge. I don’t manually go into excel and select cells.
(edit: so here’s the setup)
I have a list of people who I send letters to. Occasionally, I tweak the letter according to the recipient (in a way outside of the mail merge labels, like adding a new paragraph or whatever). For record-keeping purposes, I want to keep a copy of the exact letter I send to the recipient. If I Save a new copy of the mail merge, that would work, except that that new copy will have the mail merge fields in them and is thus, not truly a static copy of what was sent (plus, it aggravates me when Word asks me if it’s ok to import contacts into this new document).
I’ve been solving this by printing each individualized-yet-mail-merged document to Adobe PDF - the PDF is thus an exact replica of the sent letter. However, copying and pasting PDF text doesn’t work well - it especially interprets soft returns as hard returns. So, I want to be able to have a non-form-field word document, but with the form fields filled in.
If I was making slight changes to a graphic in Adobe photoshop, I could continually flatten the image, save it as a new file, and then close the original document without saving. Then, i would have my original graphic where i could easily tweak layers and customize them, but i would also have an additional “complete” file that wouldn’t have layers to so easily change.
When you complete a mail merge, are you selecting “Edit Individual Letters” at the end? It’s “Step 6 of 6”, and under “Merge” there is “Print…” and “Edit individual letters…”. That creates a brand new document for you to edit and save separately.
Thanks. Wow, I just always stopped after setting up the merge fields and then pressing CTL+P
I never used the wizard, maybe that’s why i missed that step