For example: Some of the "Company" fields are blank, and some of them have values. The addresses that have a blank in the Company field will have a gap between the name and address fields.
To close the gap whenever a record has an empty field the IF command is used.
The setup below uses the IF command to print Company and the Return character which follows it only if there is text in the Company field:
First Name Last Name¦
IF Company Company¦
ENDIF Address¦
City, State Zip¦
¦
Text between IF and ENDIFÈcommands will print only if the condition in the IF command is true. In our example, IF Company is a short way of saying, If there is something in the Company field, then print the following text, up until the ENDIF marker.
Note: The relevant point is that the carriage return by the line to be omitted must be surrounded by a conditional statement, however it is expressed.
Note also that MacWrite II understands the reverse of a condition, without needing it expressed. For example, in the formula above we don't need to include a condition describing what to do if Position is blank. If Position is there, it will be printed; if not, everything between the If and ENDIF, including the carriage return, will be omitted.
* PLEASE NOTE:
When ClarisWorks performs a mail merge, and there is no entry on a specific line of that merged data, ClarisWorks (1.0, 2.0, 2.1, and 3.0) automatically removes the blank line. There is no feature like MacWrite's IF statement to eliminate the blank line, because it is unnecessary.