We’re lucky to have the opportunity to work directly with our customers quite a lot here at Conga, and a good deal of that time is spent helping create Conga Composer templates. Word templates have always been the most popular format – they support so many different use cases, especially when they’re automatically converted to PDF by Composer upon merging.
For years, adding merge fields to Word templates wasn’t quite as intuitive as we wanted it to be. Adding one required you to insert a Microsoft Word mail merge field and then paste in the field name provided by Composer. For longtime Composer users, this should look familiar:
Through our direct interaction with customers, it became very clear that administrators would naturally gravitate towards copying and pasting a merge field name directly into their Word template, skipping the crucial step of inserting the actual Word field. I can’t tell you how many times I had to politely stop the administrator I was working with and say “Hang on one second…we need to insert a merge field before we paste in that field name.”
Rarely ever is user feedback so clear and consistent. From a product development standpoint, this was akin to being directed by those guys you see on airport runways with big neon beacons guiding pilots to their gates. However, instead of directing us to gate C37, our customers were directing us to one of the most useful new features included with Conga Composer Release 8:
Text-Based Merge Fields
Text-based merge fields make the process of adding fields to a Word template quicker and easier than ever. Instead of requiring a Microsoft Word mail merge field, text-based merge fields consist of the field name surrounded by a pair of curly brackets.
Example: {{ACCOUNT_NAME}}
The Benefits of Text-Based Merge Fields
1) Easily Added to Templates
The redesigned Template Builder in Conga Composer Release 8 makes it incredibly easy to add text-based merge fields to a Word template. Simply click to copy a text-based merge field and paste it into your template. It’s a beautiful thing.
2) Less Room for Error
Microsoft Word mail merge fields are a lot like Salesforce fields – they have a field label and a field name. These will have the same value unless you modify the field label, like we see here:
This can lead to some confusion when someone edits the field label without changing the underlying field name. In those cases, the field looks like it’s been changed since the label is different, but the actual field name is untouched. Because Conga Composer merges data based on the field name, a change to the field label won’t affect the way that field is populated.
With text-based merge fields, the field label and the name are effectively the same thing. There’s no extra “layer” to the merge field – what you see is truly what you get, and that makes editing merge fields much less prone to error.
3) No More Complex Keyboard Shortcuts
If you’ve built a few Word templates for Conga Composer, it’s more than likely you’ve learned the Alt+I+F+M+M keyboard shortcut to insert a mail merge field. I still feel like a bit of a Word ninja when I use this shortcut, but when using text-based merge fields, it’s no longer necessary. Simply copying and pasting will do the trick.
4) Support for Text-Based IF Fields
IF fields are one of the most popular features used with Word templates for Composer. Basic use of IF fields allows for conditional content in your output file, like different terms and conditions for international vs. domestic contracts. More advanced use of IF fields allows for a truly dynamic Word template where the entire composition of a document can change drastically based on predefined criteria.
With Conga Composer Release 8, you can build text-based IF fields. This is helpful for clearly identifying where IF fields exist in a template and what they evaluate. Traditional IF fields in Word are great, but unless you’re clever when constructing them, they show the corresponding result of the IF field rather than the components of the field itself. For example, the text-based IF field shown below displays the entire contents of the field. This makes it very clear to see what this IF field is evaluating. In contrast, the traditional IF field only displays the false result in the template – until data is merged, it’s literally comparing the value of “OPPORTUNITY_AMOUNT” to “15000”, so it returns false.
5) More Flexibility
Every Conga Composer solution is different, and Word templates reflect that. Although Conga Composer Release 8 supports text-based merge fields, you can also opt to use traditional mail merge fields. Fields of either type can be mixed and matched in a Word template.
That’s not to say that you should go about mixing and matching text-based and traditional merge fields for the heck of it. Consistency and simplicity are always encouraged when building templates, but there are some cases where it makes sense to use a combination of merge field types. For example, many field names related to Opportunity Products are very long. When using a text-based merge field, you’re forced to include the entire field name between the sets of curly brackets.
Example: {{OPPORTUNITY_LINEITEM_PRODUCTDESCRIPTION}}
Those fields can take up an awful lot of space in your template. In this situation, some administrators might choose to use a traditional merge field and modify the field label to effectively give their merge field a shorter alias. For example:
This results in a shorter field label that’s often easier to work with in a template. However, as I mentioned in the second point about text-based merge fields leaving less room for error, this can potentially lead to confusion further down the road. Just make sure you don’t forget about these traditional fields if you decide to use them for shorter aliases, especially if another administrator inherits the project.
That’s it for text-based merge fields! We’re excited to see how our customers will benefit from this new, more efficient way of building Word templates for Conga Composer.
You can learn about the other new features in Conga Composer Release 8 here, including how to upgrade.
Until next time!