8 Advanced features

Introduction

This chapter introduces several of the more sophisticated features of Fireworkz.

Topics covered include:

Pictures

Load the document saleslet2 from the Tutorial directory. You will see that it contains a letter from a company which is a standard reply to customers who have enquired about prices and products.

The document contains a picture, the name of the company in coloured letters up the side of the page, the company’s address, the text of the letter and, at the bottom of the page, a table.

Adding pictures

Pictures, either in the form of Draw files, Sprites or JPEGs can be added to a document simply by drawgging the file containing them in to your open document. In this example, the company logo has been added using this technique.

Moving a picture

The picture is in the wrong place. It is in the centre of the page when it should be aligned with the left-hand edge of the text. To move it:

  1. Click in the area of the picture. A red outline will appear, with handles at the corners and on the edges.
  2. Point inside this outline, press and hold down the left mouse button and drag the picture to the left, until its left-hand edge aligns with the text.
  3. Release the mouse button. The picture will be dropped at this new position.

Changing the size of a picture

Now, you need to reduce the size of the picture:

  1. Click in the area of the picture. A red outline will appear, with handles at the corners and on the edges.
  2. Point at the bottom right-hand corner handle, press and hold down the left mouse button and drag this corner around until the picture is approximately half of its original size.
  3. Release the mouse button. The picture will be resized to this new size.

Dates

The next step is to add the date to the letter. You can add dates in a wide range of formats.

  1. Click at the left-hand edge of the line above the line containing the text ‘add1’.
  2. Right justify tool button Click the Right justify tool button on the toolbar. The caret will move to the right-hand edge of the page.
  3. Choose Date from the Insert field sub-menu of the Edit menu. The Insert date dialogue box will appear.
    Fireworkz always uses today’s date as an example and shows it in each available format in the dialogue box.
  4. Choose one of the formats from the list.
  5. Ensure that the Live option is set, by clicking on it if necessary. This means that whenever you open this document, the current date will be used. If this option is switched off, the date entered today will stay fixed in the document.
  6. Click the Insert button. The date will be inserted into the document and displayed using the format you selected.

Mail merge

When this letter is sent to customers, it is personalised to some extent. As enquiries arrive they are logged in a database, held in a separate Fireworkz document. At the end of the day, responses to all the enquiries are printed using the mail shot facility.

Load the document names from the Tutorial directory. You will see that it contains a database of names and addresses held in the rows of a spreadsheet.

Selecting the database

The first stage in setting up a mail merge is to choose the database holding the names and addresses to be used. In this example, it is held in the Names spreadsheet. You could have used:

To tell Fireworkz which document to use for mail merge:

  1. Make sure that saleslet2 is the active document by clicking in it if necessary.
  2. Choose Select source from the Extra – Text – Mail merge menu. A dialogue box will appear.
  3. You need to select the file to use as your source of data. Click on names.
  4. Next you need to select the row which will be used to show you what is happening when you add fields to your letter. Choose row 1 as this is the one containing the titles of the columns.
  5. Click the OK button.

Adding fields to the letter

You are now ready to add the fields to your document. To do this:

  1. Select the first line of the recipient’s address, ‘add1’, in the saleslet2 document.
  2. Open the Mail merge sub-menu from the Extra - Text menu, and choose Insert field. A dialogue box will appear.
  3. You need to enter the number of the column holding the information you want to appear here. The first address field in the Names document is column 4, so enter 4 in the dialogue box.
  4. Click the Insert button. In the sales letter document, you will see that the text ‘add1’ has been replaced by ‘Address1’.
  5. Go through the next three lines, adding fields 5, 6 and 7. These should insert text reading Address2, Address3 and Postcode respectively.

In the salutation line of the letter, you need to add the fields for the title and the name:

  1. Select the word ‘title’ and insert field 1.
  2. Select the word ‘name’ and insert field 3.

Dealing with blank fields

One problem with this mail merge is that some addresses in the list have blank fields, often before the postcode, which could cause blank lines to appear within the address in the finished letter.

  1. Choose Select source from the Extra – Text – Mail merge menu.
  2. Choose row 5 and click the OK button. This will display the information for the fifth line of the database. You will see that this introduces a blank line into the document as it contains an empty entry for the Address3 field.

Fireworkz allows you to deal with this as follows:

  1. Choose Select source again, and click the Shuffle option button to switch it on. This tells Fireworkz to move any blank lines that appear in the document between certain fields to the end of the space.
  2. The fields which you want to shuffle are just those containing address information, so enter 4 as the start row and 7 as the end row in the dialogue box.
  3. Click the OK button. This will shuffle the blank line to the end thereby compacting the displayed address.

Printing

  1. Choose Print from the File menu.
  2. You can print a test page using the currently selected record by clicking the Print button.
  3. If the test page appears correct, you can print a copy of the letter for each of the people in the database. Choose Print again but this time click the Mailshot button.

Summary

In this chapter you learned how to manipulate pictures, add dates and use the mail merge facility.

For more information, see the relevant chapters in the User Guide.