Introducing group by, aggregation, and repeating regions in mail merge templates

Display data exactly the way you want and highlight key insights with Zoho Writer's enhanced merge templates.

We've supercharged Zoho Writer's merge templates with the capability to dynamically group, aggregate, and repeat data as blocks. You can now fetch data from any data source, including Zoho CRM, Bigin, and Creator, and present them in an easily understandable form in just a few clicks.

Here's how you can enhance data presentation using group by, aggregation, repeating regions, and data transformation.

Let's understand these new capabilities and how to use them in detail. To make this easier, let's take a look at how Zylker Automobiles, an imaginary car manufacturer, uses the new group and loop options to easily present their data in different ways.

1. Visualize data with group by for easy and quick understanding.

Business case: Generate a master pricelist with the state-wise price of all car models.

Zylker Automobiles' sales admin uses group by and repeating regions to display the price list for all car models separately for each state whenever the prices of their cars are changed.

Group by helps you to group data based on a specific field or value. With repeating regions, you can configure the layout/table/row only once and dynamically expand it based on the volume of data, instead of manually expanding it. Click here for the detailed steps to use the group by function.

Watch this video to learn how to use the group by, aggregation, and data transformation capabilities in your mail merge templates.

2. Summarize data to highlight key aspects and insights.

Business case: Generate the monthly revenue report with country-wide and region-specific revenue summaries and breakdowns.

You can use the aggregation functions to summarize a large chunk of data to glean important insights like maximum, minimum, count, average, and sum.

Zylker Automobiles' sales admin combines the power of the built-in group by, aggregation, and repeating regions to highlight the:

Total revenue generated in a month.
State-wise total revenue with a breakdown of revenue from each category.
Granular, item-wise breakdown of revenue for each category for every state.

Click here to learn how to use the aggregation functions.

3. Transform data to create and populate sub-forms.

Business case: Generate and save the detailed revenue report of each state as a separate file in a specific folder.

Zylker Automobiles uses data transformation to map the desired fields in the data source as main and sub-form fields. This allows them to extract and process the raw, unordered transactional data to generate the revenue report for each state separately. Click here to know how to use the Transform Data Source option.

4. Format data with the new number-formatting options.

Business case: Send an email to each SDR at the beginning of every month with their total revenue from the previous month in words, along with a summary of their performance.

Zoho Writer has added new formatting options exclusively for numbers. With these, you can now convert a number to text, ordinal number, ordinal text, and ordinal year.

The Zylker Automobiles sales admin uses the new Number to Text formatting option to convert and display numbers as texts in email that they send to their SDR every month.

Try the group by and aggregation functions in Writer's mail merge templates, and let us know your feedback. You can also watch this video to understand how to use these features to elevate your documents.

If you need any assistance or have any questions in configuring the group by, aggregation, or data transformation operations, please write to us at support@zohowriter.com or add a comment below.

Happy merging and data visualizing!

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