I am trying to create a template that allows users to click on a number of buttons to create a customizable template for emailing. The "Email Campaign Management" application that comes with FM8 does exactly what I want in this respect (and a whole lot that I don't want in others), but I'll be honest in saying that, despite my knowledge and experience in FM, I don't know how they did it! :

If after creating the layout with buttons and a field that gets populated with them, how do you convert that into a field that merges the data? For example, if I have in the template "Dear ...", how do I convert that to "Dear John" for one record and"Dear Jane" for another?

Any help would be greatly greatly appreciated!!!

Ron

You can do that using the "Substitute" function.

Substitute([LetterContent; <>;FirstName];

[<>;Email)

What the substitute does is look for the <> and replace that with the contents of the corresponding FIELD. Where <> is your place holder and FIELD is the name of your field containing the names.

Wrong syntax. See here:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/172295/post/186702

Alpha-Snail, since you have FM8 Advanced, you might also consider this custom function to evaluate the merge text to return a result. There's a practical Contacts-type example somewhere towards the end of the thread (post#165807):

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/120434/