Access SQL query to mailmerge - sql

Question

How can I transform this table from this
id name
1 sam
2 nick
3 ali
4 farah
5 josef
6 fadi
to
id1 name1 id2 name2 id3 name3 id4 name4
1 sam 2 nick 3 ali 4 farah
5 josef 6 fadi
the reason i need this is i have a database and i need to do a mail merge using word and I want to print every 4 rows on one page, MS word can only print one row per page, so using an SQL query I want one row to represent 4 rows
thanks in advance
Ali

Answer 1

You don't need to create a query for this in Access. Word has a merge field called <<Next Record>> which forces moving to the next record. If you look at how label documents are created using the Mail Merge Wizard, you'll see that's how it's done.
Updated - Doing this in SQL
The columns in simple SELECT statements are derived from the columns from the underlying table/query (or from expressions). If you want to define columns based on the data, you need to use a crosstab query.
First create a query with a running count for each person (say your table is called People), and calculate the row and column position from the running count:
SELECT People.id, Count(*)-1 AS RunningCount, int(RunningCount/4) AS RowNumber, RunningCount Mod 4 AS ColumnNumber
FROM People
LEFT JOIN People AS People_1 ON People.id >= People_1.id
GROUP BY People.id;
(You won't be able to view this in the Query Designer, because the JOIN isn't comparing with = but with >=.)
This query returns the following results:
id Rank RowNumber ColumnNumber
1 0 0 0
2 1 0 1
3 2 0 2
4 3 0 3
5 4 1 0
6 5 1 1
Assuming this query is saved as Positions, the following query will return the results:
TRANSFORM First(Item) AS FirstOfItem
SELECT RowNumber
FROM (
SELECT ID AS Item, RowNumber, "id" &( ColumnNumber + 1) AS ColumnHeading
FROM Positions
UNION ALL SELECT Name, RowNumber, "name" & (ColumnNumber +1)
FROM Positions
INNER JOIN People ON Positions.id = People.id
) AS AllValues
GROUP BY AllValues.RowNumber
PIVOT AllValues.ColumnHeading In ("id1","name1","id2","name2","id3","name3","id4","name4");
The UNION is there so each record in the People table will have two columns - one with the id, and one with the name.
The PIVOT clause forces the columns to the specified order, and not in alphabetical order (e.g. id1, id2 ... name1, name2...)