I'm writing on behalf of OPAL Community Land Trust, Karin Slabaugh, and
myself. We are trying to learn how to use the form letters and thank you
letters sections of eBase on our PC running windows 98. We have inherited
the system and the populated eBase database and have been working with it,
mostly adding data, since July. Now it is time for us to pull data out for
some solicitation letters and also to create some thank you letters for our
annual auction. We have studied the eBase documentation and think we
understand the process to create these two type of documents, but we have
not had any success yet.
We suspect we may have corrupted eBase files but we don't really know that.
We think that because our system does not behave like the documentation
says it will. We have text problems, layout problems and merge field
problems. Here are some of our symptoms.
1. When we follow the directions to open form letters (opening FMP as
"master", selecting "mode" and "layouts" we do not have access to the
numbered letters in the drop down menu above the "rolodex". In fact, there
is nothing to scroll through, but we can see other items in layout mode if
we click on the rolodex cards. We never see "Letter #1" (etc.) even when we
use this method. We have been able to use the drop down menu above the
rolodex in an older version of our backups, but we can no longer access it
in any current version of our files. Does this indicate corrupted eBase
files? Suggestions?
2. If we find, for example, "Letter #7" by the manual method which we
believe is a letter that has no pre-set formatting or merged fields, we can
create a document using Microsoft Word, then we cut and paste it into
"Letter #7". We can make some revisions using the "A" tool but we don't
really understand what should be done in Word and what can be done in
eBase. For example, we have not successfully changed text to bold or italic
and had it print in the letter. We believe our problem is related to our
first question, but we also wonder if we should be using "paste special" in
Word and pasting as an RTF document (formatted text), of if we should
"Paste Document", either choice being under the "edit" menu when we are in
"layout" mode. By the way, we can access the various Thank You Letter #x's
via drop down menus when we get to them via "Payments" to "Print" "Thank
You" then "Mode" to "Layout" and using the drop down menu under the rolodex.
3. We also cannot use merge fields in our letters whether we create them
"from scratch" or use the drop down under "edit" for "Paste special" and
use "Merge Field".
To date our solutions to these problems have been to export the data and
fields we want to Excel, then we do a mail merge in Word to generate our
letters. Karin has created source codes for these events and we have
successfully (we think) updated our database to track those events because
we can print envelopes. This seems like a very tedious workaround, and we'd
like to avoid doing our work this way.
That said, please help us know where to go or what to do next.
Thanks in advance, Judy
Scott and Judy Whiting live on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands of
Washington State.
voice: (360) 376-5816
