mailmerge

[Graeme R Forbes]

"I use the mailmerge feature in Word to
import variables such as the date of the report, the name of the product
on which the report is based, the final score that the product achieved
and so on... Is this something that I can do better using Framemaker?"

Mark, FM doesn't come with a mail merge facility, so your choices 
are, fake one with the program's other capacities, or find an add-on.

On the Mac, I've heard of people getting the effect of mailmerge 
using Publish and Subscribe. No doubt there's a Windows equivalent of 
this. But thinking about how you might do it suggests it would be a 
huge hassle.

An add-on would be a better way to go, perhaps. But the results of 
googling "mail merge for FrameMaker" are not reassuring. Taking 
values out of a document belonging to another application and pasting 
them into an FM doc in the right place is something that's not hard 
to script, tho'. If you don't want to try it yourself there are 
people on this list who sell such a service.

What you're talking about seems to be a kind of database publishing. 
You could check Adobe's site for this -- I believe there are some 
heavyweight apps which do this working with FM. But they might well 
be overkill for your needs.

Graeme Forbes