Utilizing Word and Excel For Estimating

AZSkoz 

This would be a LOT easier face-to-face than via postings on a message board. You could show me more than a single screen shot, I could demonstrate what I mean by referring to Mail Merge and its capabilities.

A screen shot, for example, is somewhat informative, but it (for example) doesn't enable me to see what those "conditional formatting" rules are that you tell me have been broken. Conditional formatting is typically used to highlight some cells that meet (or fail to meet) certain conditions. I see cells that are highlighted, but whether that means a rule has been met, not met, ignored....I can't actually tell (despite how clear it it to you). And it's not clear, although in person it could immediately be clarified what the customer actually ends up seeing of this, which numbers are hidden and which are presented.

My point on Mail Merge--you had been asking of a way to integrate Word and Excel--and I simply said it made me think that Mail Merge might help. You may well be thinking of Mail Merge as nothing more than a way to get "personalized" versions of what are in fact impersonal mass mailings. The address and salutation change, but everything else is the same throughout hundreds or thousands of letters. And in fact, that probably is how it's used in 97.3% of the times it's employed.

BUT, in fact, and I've done this, you can integrate an Excel database with complex data of various sorts with Word, through the merge capabilities, to produce highly individualized documents, each with quite distinctive sections. Still, yes, a basic consistent structure. During my working career (I retired nearly 20 years ago) I used mail merge, much more primitive I suspect than it is today, to produce individualized letters to thousands of employees concerning their benefits; different lines of detailed and differing costs, different paragraphs altogether, were automatically placed on the page for John Appleseed, who got a different letter entirely from Mary Marple, etc., etc. Yet all were also similar in their purpose while varied in their content.

You put these together using a similar structure for each client, but they also vary. As I said, I was just proposing a highly individualized cover page, with the details that would follow from Excel, the latter being the data source for all of it.

Now, that still may not be what you want--which is fine--but we need to get a lot more info flowing in both directions in order to progress. Is it at all possible for you to post an actual spreadsheet, not just an image? Does the idea of a cover letter make any sense at all (a personalized cover letter with the high level bottom line numbers)? Any sense at all?