Multiline data merge workaround

[Amontillado]

The situation is this - you're grumpy and truly love your word processor, the incomparable Mellel. Unfortunately, it doesn't support mail merge. You're grumpy. It's not like you're going to start using Word.

Affinity to the rescue, but there's a problem.

If you create a spreadsheet with multiline cells for addresses, Affinity will change the intra-cell newlines into spaces. For a year I railed against fate and hand edited merged envelopes and documents.

This morning an obvious solution came to mind.

In Numbers (or Excel, or whatever) do a global search and replace. Change every instance of "\n" to "¶\n" in the spreadsheet, merge in Affinity, and in Affinity replace every instance of "¶ " (pilcrow followed by space) to "\n".

Bingo, presto, Bob's your uncle, or whatever you say, multiline merge done without really much delay.

An added benefit is if you use the ¶ character you might be able to be that one guy on the writing team who still knows what a pilcrow is. That's worth a lot.

[BlueLiner]

Awesome. Will try on next mailing.