I have a file with basic student information (name, address, city, state, zip, etc.). I

I'm supposing that the portal contains everthing that is late/not paid/ not turned in, correct? If you've got multiple portals on the same layout, the below solution will read only the first one. I'm not aware of how to tell it to look at the next one or a specific one.

Create a new (regular) text field in the student table named allOwed. Supossing that a field in the portal is named owed (Showing a single item that's owed). When you are ready to print the letter, run a script like this -

clear [allOwed]

goto Layout [studentowed] // or whatever the layout showing the portal is

goto Portal Row [first]

Loop

Set allOwed [allOwed & "

Thank you very much for your thoughts. I think that this is the right direction. Not quite there though. I did set up the database with multiple portals on the student layout... a portal for athletic issues, one for outstanding library books, one for missing textbooks, and another couple that I expect will be one item only. I didn't want just one generic portal because I actually produced some additional calculation fields that set off each section. I did try to tailor your script to the athletic portal... but I'm not getting every row read somehow. Why is it that only the first portal is read?

Just about everything in your description suggests that a single table of Outstanding Issues is the solution.

See also here .

I don't know why a person can't select which portal to read off of on a layout, so to say. I fond it kinda frustrating myself. Here's another idea that'll work, and you won't have to change your layout.

Create new 'hidden' layouts that have one portal per layout. You don't have to have a fancy looking layout, just create a blank layout, put the first portal on it, create a second layout, put portal #2 on it, and so on.

Modify your script so that it goes to new layout #1, reads all portal rows (like previously mentioned), goes to new layout #2, reads all portal rows, and so on. That should do the trick.