Resolving Errors That Occur When Generating Your Letter

When creating your custom letter templates, occasionally you may encounter an error when generating a preview of the letter, or when generating the letter itself. These errors are usually caused by changes in the formatting of the letter interrupting the merge tags. Let’s look at some examples of common issues and then review how we can go about resolving these errors.

Example 1:

In this instance, the font size of the address block was changed, but the last bracket ” } ” was missed, and thus the system cannot decode the merge field for zip code.

Example 2:

In this example, the salutation line was made bold, but the bracket was again missed.

Example 3:

In this example, a comma was erroneously added prior to the bracket rather than after it.

Resolving Errors

There are other possible errors, but these are the most common. When you encounter the error, you should take a look at the opening and closing brackets ( { and } ) around merge fields and make sure there are no extra characters inserted and that the entire merge field, including brackets, is formatted the same. Once you find the problematic area, select the text and use the Format -> Clear Formatting menu option. Then apply the formatting again, taking care to select the entire merge field.

If you cannot quickly determine where the issue is, you can select all text and clear the formatting, then reapply formatting to the document where needed.