I have created a very clever way to produce boatloads of HTML files with predictable variables, using Quickeys and Automator and Word Mail Merge.
Many complicated steps, but I end up with what I want.
Except for one critically important part that brings the whole spit-and-paperclips construction crashing to the ground: my end result is one longass document that does me no good at all.
I need to save my results with specific names since the pages are HTML and are links.
The fact that Mail Merge does not offer the option of saving separate documents is amazing to me… this seems like a very fundamental sort of need.
And unfortunately, no, I do not know how to write Applescript code… I’m sure I could do this if I did know Applescript. Unfortunately my abilities are more basic than that.
My advice would be to do your giant mail merge, save the file as plain text (.txt) and then use something like PERL to do some work on it. If your mail merge includes data that could be used to identify an intended file name, then you could easily write a script that scans your giant text doc for the tag, extracts the filename from it and then write all the text it finds into the new file until it bumps into another tag.
Alas, my knowledge of PERL is too limited to write up that script without spending a lot of time checking reference books.
(And, in case it needs to be said: you can run PERL scripts from the command line using Terminal in Mac OS X.)
Of course, it might be easier to generate your HTML files using PERL from the very beginning rather than mucking around with Word.