Question

My client has asked me to set up a mail merge structure with an existing database of contacts. They want to be able to upload some sort of Microsoft office document into the system, then I need to be able to generate this file as a printable loop replacing the set fields matching the database.

e.g. Dear %%FIRST_NAME%% would change to Dear John or whatever the record is within the database.

So I am wondering what file type they can export out of Microsoft word to upload into my system that I could use fwrite to string replace these variables and then somehow set up a loop to be able to print these all out.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use PHPWord for this. http://phpword.codeplex.com/

It allows you to open the doc/docx file and edit it, although for .doc files you need some compatibility pack (hopefully you can get docx files which are just zips of XML files)

If you can, I would recommend you using their template system, since that would greatly facilitate your life.

All you need: instead of doing this:

Dear %%FIRST_NAME%%, I still listen to your music, man!

Do something like this:

Dear ${FirstName}, I still listen to your music, man!

Then in your PHP code you can do this:

<?php
require_once('PHPWord.php');

$phpWord = new PHPWord();
$doc = $phpWord->loadTemplate("yourdoc.docx");
$document->setValue("FirstName", "John Lennon");
$document->save("yourdoc_modified.docx");

An extra I forgot to say: You don’t require running the PHP server on Windows for using this. As long as you have the zip and XML libraries installed, you’re all fine.