Sunday Start Diary Inserts

I infrequently get requested for diary inserts with the start of the week on a Sunday rather than Monday. We also get some really odd requests for 5 day week (no weekend) or Thursday start inserts etc.

So we do not offer a customised service for one off inserts, and if you look at the list of inserts we already provide a large number of different inserts already and we are not going to start offering them with Sunday start as well as Monday start.

Hopefully with the help of this post you will be able to adapt our source files to create your own Sunday start files should you wish to have that feature.

The change over is relatively easy to do. But you need to follow the steps to achieve the end result shown here:

So we will be using this example. Firstly you need to download the two source files (Word and Excel)  the Word base file and the Excel data file you will need both.

First step is to open the Excel file.

You will see something like this:

We need to change the first row to look like this:

Things to note:

1. The column headings are the same, they have just been reordered to move Sunday to the start of the week. No other row is changed. 
2. The date for the Sunday in Cell A2 is obviously changed compared to the original. 

So having made those small changes save the file to the same folder as you have the Word file in. 

The next step is to open the Word file you downloaded. It will look something like this:

If you go in to the Mail Merge Manager (the location of this will vary depending on which version of Word/Office you are using)

If you toggle the 'Preview Results' the page should change to something like this: 

The merge labels are fairly clear as to which ones they are. We need to shuffle things around a bit to get things to a Sunday start, to something like this: 

Now if you toggle the preview button again you will see things are in the correct order but Sunday and Wednesday will not look quite right, this is because they have moved from one side to the other. And if you look at the earlier images you will see that on the left hand page it is date then day, and on the right hand page it is day then date. 

But there is an easy fix. Toggle the Preview Results again until you can see the Merge Fields again. 

Right click on <<datesu>> and click 'Toggle Field Codes'  Then change it to 

{MERGEFIELD DateSu \@ "d DDDD"\*lower } 

Basically you are just repositioning the lower case d to move the date to the beginning. And do a similar change to <<datewe>> and move the d to the other side of the DDDD part of the field code. 

Then do 'Update Field Code' then click on Preview Results and everything should look as you need it to be. 

Also note that the header fields are changed to <<datesu>> inplace of <<datemo>> and on the other page to <<datewe>> instead of <<dateth>> This just ensures the correct month is shown in the header. 

Then do 'Update Field Code' then click on Preview Results and everything should look as you need it to be.

If everything looks as it should, it is now time to do the mail merge as usual to create your new file.

Insert the blank page at the start of the new file and remove the section breaks (^B) and you have your file ready for printing. 

If all of the above was a little bit too much for you here are a set of files to help you get started:

The source files Word and Excel.

And I've also done some 2017 files as well in Word and PDF ready to be downloaded and printed in the usual way.

Oh and then I broke all the rules, so here is not only Sunday start... but Letter size or Half Letter size when booklet printed!

I've not been able to 'test' this variant because here in the modern world we only have ISO size paper!

However, if you want to play with the Letter size variant you will need to use:

The source Letter files Word and Excel.

And I've also done some Letter 2017 files as well in Word and PDF ready to be downloaded and printed in the usual way.

Converting other files to Sunday start is similar.

Enjoy.