I am numbering this job from 15001 to 16800, now my problem is how to do it. i used mail merge on the previous job because each page just had the same number repeated 14 times, but now on each page 18 different numbers must appear and well i have tried everything maybe someone can help me because i have run out of ideas!
I think the Elis.G example in http://community.coreldraw.com/forums/p/26149/122816.aspx would be a good start. His example is 4 up rather than 18 up, and he is using 4 digit numbers rather than 5, but the principle is the same.
You will note that he does not lay out the numbers sequentially on the page and there is good reason for that, which you will find when you come to cut them up. If you set them out so that each page contains sequential numbers, then you will have to collate them after cutting, which will be quite tedious and liable to error. But by extending the numbering through the sequential pages you will find that the pages only need to be cut as single stacks and avoid the need for subsequent collation.
unfortunately this doesnt help harry, want i want is a sequence of numbers following each other on the same page
This will not work with autoincrement because there is no option to increment by an arbitrary number eg 14, which is what you would need on each subsequent page. But you could probably achieve it by setting the page up the same way and then merging using values from a CSV file.
You can start from http://community.coreldraw.com/forums/p/42170/200851.aspx#200851 but in your case you would need 14 columns which I think would contain =row()*14+1+14986 in the first cell, =row()*14+2+14986 in the second cell. I've not tested this so you may need to adjust the 14986 if the start value is wrong and you also need to stuff in the alphabetic prefix -- which is certainly possible but I'm not sure of the correct syntax.
Mail merge is exactly what you need but you also need imposition layout. Setup a single page that is the size of the two cells, the "EAAA" and the "EAAA-XXXXX". Run merge to a new document and then print from that document using imposition layout with the appropriate size page and number of rows and columns. It's pretty easy once you have done it but not so easy to figure out on your own. If you have no idea what that all means, post the spreadsheet with the numbers and a cdr with the two cells and I could set it up for you pretty easily.
The imposition is "optional" here, in the sense that you can either start with a page of 14 pre-imposed labels and 14 fields per page requiring serial number substitution, or with a single 1-up label and have just one substitution per page.
Which is best? Without setting them both up and testing them, I wouldn't like to say for certain.
The one-up layout is simpler to set up and could use the incremental numbering scheme, but it requires print merge to create an intermediate document with 1800 pages.
The 14-up layout would take a bit more setting up, requiring a pre-calculated CSV with the serial numbers, but the intermediate document would need only about 130 pages.
My guess -- and its only a guess -- is that the 14up version would complete first and the 1 up version is more likely to exceed internal limitations.