Report Builder:  Letters and Mailing Labels
The Report Builder is a powerful tool that allows you to define your own queries to your data, and then print it, export it to files or other programs, or create formatted letters and mailing labels.

When creating a letter, you must first choose a group of people to address by defining a query to your contact data. The form below shows a query that will return business contacts for the Beaver Creek School Auction. Each piece, or field, of information wanted is selected in the first column. If you want the data sorted in a particular way, simply place the order for a field in the "Sort" column. You'll can see that the "Operator" and "Criteria Value 1" columns tell AuctionBase only to return contacts whose Business field equals "Yes". It's that simple.

When the Preview Data button is clicked, AuctionBase displays the contacts that matched the query in the form below. From here, you have many choices for what to do with your data. If you'd like, you can simply print it out in a grid view. You can also opt to send the data to another application, like Microsoft ® Word or Excel, send it as a mail merge to Microsoft® Word, or just save it in a text, HTML, or CSV file.

To create a formatted letter click the Letter button below the data.

To create formatted letters, you define a template in the form below. AuctionBase is told where to insert your data by placing the name of the field between brackets (<>) right in the body of the letter. You can control the font, text color, text justification, and other formatting of your letter just as you would in any word processor.

When you have your letter written, click the "Print Preview" button. AuctionBase will create a letter for each of the contacts returned by your query, replacing the field names with the actual data. The picture below shows one of the letters generated from the above query and template.

Using the same query as used for the letter, you can create mailing labels for your envelopes. The form below allows you to create a label template, just as you did for your letter, employing your choice of over 100 standard Avery® label types.

Below is a sample of the labels printed from the above template.

 
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