How to automate Word from Visual Basic to create a mail merge for mailing labels

• Contact_Name
• Address
• City
• Postal_Code
• Country

Contact_Name	Address	          City	     Postal_Code      Country
Maria Anders	Obere Str. 57	 Berlin	     12209	    Germany  
Thomas Hardy	120 Hanover Sq.	 London	     WA1 1DP	    UK
Hanna Moos	Forsterstr. 57	 Mannheim     68306	    Germany
Laurence Lebihan  12, rue des Bouchers Marseille   13008	    France

				

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Step-by-step example

1. Start a new Standard EXE project in Visual Basic. By default, a form that is named Form1 is created.
2. Add a CommandButton to Form1.
3. Select the Microsoft Word Object Library for the version of Word that you intend to automate, and then click OK.
4. Copy the following code to the code window of Form1.

   Private Sub Command1_Click()
   
       Dim oApp As Word.Application
       Dim oDoc As Word.Document
       
       'Start a new document in Word
       Set oApp = CreateObject("Word.Application")
       Set oDoc = oApp.Documents.Add
       
       With oDoc.MailMerge
           
           'Insert the mail merge fields temporarily so that
           'you can use the range that contains the merge fields as a layout
           'for your labels -- to use this as a layout, you can add it
           'as an AutoText entry.
           With .Fields
               .Add oApp.Selection.Range, "Contact_Name"
               oApp.Selection.TypeParagraph
               .Add oApp.Selection.Range, "Address"
               oApp.Selection.TypeParagraph
               .Add oApp.Selection.Range, "City"
               oApp.Selection.TypeText "  "
               .Add oApp.Selection.Range, "Postal_Code"
               oApp.Selection.TypeText " -- "
               .Add oApp.Selection.Range, "Country"
           End With
           Dim oAutoText As Word.AutoTextEntry
           Set oAutoText = oApp.NormalTemplate.AutoTextEntries.Add("MyLabelLayout", oDoc.Content)
           oDoc.Content.Delete 'Merge fields in document no longer needed now
                               'that the AutoText entry for the label layout
                               'has been added so delete it.
           
           'Set up the mail merge type as mailing labels and use
           'a tab-delimited text file as the data source.
           .MainDocumentType = wdMailingLabels 
           .OpenDataSource Name:="C:\data.txt" 'Specify the data source here
   
           'Create the new document for the labels using the AutoText entry
           'you added -- 5160 is the label number to use for this sample.
           'You can specify the label number you want to use for the output
           'in the Name argument.
           oApp.MailingLabel.CreateNewDocument Name:="5160", Address:="", _
               AutoText:="MyLabelLayout", LaserTray:=wdPrinterManualFeed
   
           'Execute the mail merge to generate the labels.
           .Destination = wdSendToNewDocument
           .Execute
   
           'Delete the AutoText entry you added
           oAutoText.Delete
           
       End With
       
       'Close the original document and make Word visible so that
   
       'the mail merge results are displayed
       oDoc.Close False
       oApp.Visible = True
   
       'Prevent save to Normal template when user exits Word
       oApp.NormalTemplate.Saved = True
       
   End Sub
   					

   The Name argument for the OpenDataSource method in this code references the data source as c:\data.txt. If the data source has a different path or a different file name, modify this line in the code accordingly.
5. Press the F5 key to run the program, and then click Command1. A mailing label document is created by using data that is taken from the data source.

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