Creating Custom Form Letters and Reports

You can use the Export to Text capability of Gradekeeper together with the mail merge capability of Microsoft Word to create custom form letters or reports.

• First, export the items you want in your report from Gradekeeper:
• Choose Export to Text from the File menu
• Choose the items you want in your report
• Click the Export button
• Choose a name for the text file
• Click the Save button

Next, start Microsoft Word. Choose Data Merge Manager from the Tools menu. The Data Merge Manager will appear:

In the Main Document section, click Create and choose Form Letters. In the Data Source section, click Get Data and choose Header Source. The Create Header Source window will appear:

Click Remove Field Name until all of the default field names have been removed. Then enter the field names you want. Your field names must match the items you exported from Gradekeeper and must be in the same order that Gradekeeper has them. Click OK when you finish entering your field names. The standard save dialog will appear. Choose a name for your header source document and click Save.

In the Data Merge Manager, in the Data Source section, click Get Data. Choose Open Data Source. The standard open dialog will appear. Choose the text file you exported from Gradekeeper. After you choose your text file, the Header Record Delimiters window will appear:

Choose tab as the field delimiter and enter as the record delimiter, then click OK. The Data Merge Manager window should now appear something like this:

You can now type your form letter. To insert one of the items you exported, drag the appropriate button from the Merge Field section of the Data Merge Manager into your document. When you are done typing your form letter, it may look like this:

You can now create a merged document by clicking the new document button in the Merge section of the Data Merge Manager:

You can also choose to send your form letter by email. Your data source (the text file you created when doing the export to text from Gradekeeper) must include an email address for each student. You can add those email addresses using Microsoft Excel. Open the text file with Excel. Copy and paste the email addresses into a blank column from the document where they are saved. You also need to choose Microsoft Entourage as your default email application.

When creating your merged document, Microsoft Word may warn you about having empty records in your data source. This warning indicates that there were one or more blank items in your text file. You can ignore these warnings.

Once you create a mail merge document, you can use the same mail merge document many times. Simply change the data source to the text file you exported from Gradekeeper, and create a new merged document.