Author: Sam Yerramalla
Date: September 2025
Audience: system engineers, product owner, test engineers, quality engineers, and anyone responsible for creating and maintaining mail merge templates.
Environmental Details: Jama Connect®
Use Case
Jama Connect® lets you use mail merge templates to create custom export documents by exporting project data into structured sections (e.g., sets, requirements, sub-requirements, text items). This article explains how to add custom text and insert page breaks between sections to tailor your export document.
⚠️ Note: If you type custom text or add page breaks directly into a mail merge template, it will always appear at the beginning of the report, regardless of where you place it within the template. This article provides a workaround approach to meet the objective of tailoring your export document with custom text and page breaks.
Best Practice
💡Use a Text item in your Jama Connect® project to insert custom text and page breaks between sections in your export. Follow the implementation instructions found in this article.
Implementation
Inserting custom text between sections of export document:
- Add a Text item in your Jama Connect® project where you want the custom text to appear between sections.
- For instance, if you want to insert custom text in a sample project between the Stakeholder and System Requirements sections, then add a text item between the two sets as shown…
- In the Description field of that item, add the custom text (e.g., “Appendix Begins Here” or “The following requirements apply to Release 2.0 only”). Note: you can use other fields as well instead of description fields.
- Update Your Mail Merge Template by configuring the Text item block (represented in this example as "TXT") in your template to display the item’s name and/or description:
«TemplateStart:TXT»
«name»
«description»
«TemplateEnd:TXT»
- This ensures the custom text you entered in the description or other such field of the added Text item type in Jama Connect® project appears exactly in the Mail Merge custom Word or PDF report where the Text item is positioned in the project.
Inserting Page Breaks in export document:
The same approach shown above for inserting custom texts can also be used to insert page breaks (empty pages) between sections.
⚠️ Note: Similar to the limitations with inserting custom text between sets, you cannot insert a page break in a Mail Merge template by simply placing a page break in the template text between two sets. Reason is Mail Merge processes content per set, so any formatting (like page breaks) added directly between sets in the template is ignored. To insert a page break between sections, you must add a Page Break item within the project itself, which the Mail Merge will then recognize.
- Add a word Page Break in the Mail Merge Template after the «TemplateStart:TXT»
- For example, the template text can look like this….
«TemplateStart:TXT»
Insert your word page break here in the word template using Word's Page Break insert.
«name»
«description»
«TemplateEnd:TXT»
- This ensures Page Breaks you entered in the description or other such field of the added Text item type in Jama Connect® project appears exactly in the Mail Merge custom word or PDF report where the Text item is positioned in the project.
⚠️ Note: If you choose to use a Generic Item instead of built-in Text item, be sure to use the corresponding Set Key for that item in your Mail Merge template, rather than the TXT key shown in the example above.
Happy exporting!
References
- Understanding How Mail Merge (Office) Templates Work
- Office / Mail Merge Template Resource Links - Master List
- Using Conditional Statements in Mail Merge Templates
- Custom Report Training Services
- Request a Solution Offering or Training from the Success Catalog
Feedback:
We welcome your input! Please leave any comments or suggestions below.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.