Multi-level numbering can be a very useful tool in larger documents; having clearly identifiable chapters, sections and paragraphs allow you to easily reference and cross-reference your works. Of course, you can do this manually, but using automation gives a number of advantages:

• Automatic updates. Perhaps the most important reason to use automated numbering is what happens when you have 100 items and need to add a new item in the first ten – if you've numbered manually, then you'll need to edit 90-odd numbers to get everything correct again.
• Cross-referencing.  Using the cross reference tool also gives advantages:
  • Automatic updates – just as with the numbering itself, automatic updating means that your references won't need manually changing if you add more items; this can be especially useful with cross-referencing as these can sometimes be forgotten or overlooked.
  • Hyperlinks – the cross-references can be used as hyperlinks, allowing a user to immediately navigate to the text when viewing an electronic version.

Much like numbering paragraphs, chapter numbering allows for significant advantages when creating very large documents:

• As well as the advantages listed above, when you're printing documents having chapters with separate page-numbering allows changes of small parts of the document without affecting the numbering of the whole document (for example chapter 2 of a document could use numbers that re-start with the chapter, meaning that chapter 1 could change significantly and you wouldn't have to re-print chapter 2). 
• Chapter numbering can also be used to create tables of contents, and number annexes or appendices.

Of course we can also bring your document to life with a variety of images, such as:

• Product photos
• Charts from MS Excel spreadsheets
• Slides from MS PowerPoint presentations

Whilst the styles on this document could be set manually, by selecting each piece of text and defining the colour, font, paragraph spacing, borders, shading, numbering, etc (there are dozens of attributes that could be set) there are many advantages to using set styles to do this:

• Consistency.  If you're trying to set many attributes every time, it's easy to forget one or two and leave your document looking inconsistent.
• Ease of changing.  By using a style, you can make a change and have it cascade throughout the document – even when the document is hundreds of pages long.
• Co-operation.  When multiple people are working for the same organisation, using a document template with built-in styles means that each document produced will keep the same corporate style.

Mail Merge

A Mail merge is a process to add data to a document from a data source, often used to create personalised letters, pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels. The feature is usually employed on a Word document which contains fixed text (which is the same in each output document) and variables which are replaced by text from the data source.

Data Sources

The data source is typically a spreadsheet or a database which has a field or column for each variable in the template. When the mail merge process is run, Word creates an output document for each row in the database, using the fixed text exactly as it appears. 

Uses

Mail merge can then be used either to create a mass-mailing by printing a document for every entry in the source, or you can pick a specific record to print when required.

Mail merge can also be used to create single documents that contain lists – for example, a list of employees can quickly and easily be added to a document in order to create sheets for signatures directly from a database.  This can have advantages over the use of MS Access reports (which we can also offer as part of our database design services) as the other parts of the document can be easily edited by users without database design experience.

Database Integration

Needless to say, if we design you a bespoke MS Access database then we can enable full integration between the database and mail merge documents.  Using MS Access means that we can create detailed queries to pick out just the data you need.