I never planned to ever mail merge with MS Publisher, but since the template for the students' report card was made in Publisher I more or less had to give it a try.

I put the data in MS Excel.

The only interesting problem was how to achieve these check marks:

I came up with this:

The formula checks if the rightmost character of the column titles (A4, A3, ...) equals the number in K2 (4, 3, 2, or 1). If it is, a ΓΌ is printed, which in font Wingdings is a check mark.

In MS Publisher I had the fields A4, A3, ..., and they were empty or not depending on the value of K2. So all I had to do for each student was to put a number from 4 to 1 in K2 for the class work effort. Homework effort was put in L2, etc.