-- Edgy in Edmonton

A: You're going to be pleasantly surprised to learn that you won't have to give up your FileMaker Pro system. To the contrary, you'll be able to do more in the realm of electronic form letters than any e-mail program. But let's look further than e-mail for one moment. These days the term "electronic communications" can mean so much more than just e-mail. Adding to the communications cacophony are such mechanisms as instant messaging, SMS text messaging, traditional mail lists and discussion forums, and RSS news feeders. Blogs would fall into this modern messaging category as well, because services exist that can provide notification when your favorite blogs are updated.

All these styles, of course, presume your intended recipient participates in that particular method of electronic communication. Because e-mail is the most prevalent and ubiquitous of these, I'll constrain my answer to how FileMaker Pro can create, manage, and automate e-mail messages to solve your evolving form letter requirement.

Let's begin by looking at how you produce your printed form letters. You'll find the electronic process very similar at the fundamental level. As you've already discovered, you can use FileMaker Pro to create the equivalent of mail merged form letters. The most common way to do so -- at least initially -- is to create a layout in the form of a letter with static text label blocks (using FileMaker Pro's text tool). These text blocks comprise the bulk of the letter body. Place your text, number, and date fields to display the data that vary between FileMaker Pro records. When you navigate to each record, the form letter message remains essentially the same but reflects the specific values from that record.

This basic method works fine when record data is on its own line or in specific locations on the form letter. However, it's difficult to embed database values into a paragraph of static text -- and get them to align and flow smoothly. For this purpose FileMaker Pro provides Merge Fields. In FileMaker Pro, a Merge Field isn't a separate object (such as text, number, or date fields), but rather is a special tag or sequence of characters that may appear in any text label. The field name is enclosed by double angle brackets (e.g., <<FirstName>>) to represent where in the text block the record data should appear. In Browse and Preview modes, the record data for each merge field appears in place of the tags. You needn't worry too much about having to size, align, and format entry fields -- the other characters in the text label block adjust so the merge fields flow naturally and seamlessly. This is the same effect as doing a mail merge placing FileMaker Pro data into a Microsoft Word document via "placeholders," as Microsoft calls them. For convenience, you can add Merge Fields from the Insert menu while in Layout mode or you can type the characters directly into a text label.