Hi Renee,
It typically depends on what data you are trying to pull. There are many reports that utilize the "Show Distinct Households Only" or even on an export in the application, you can choose "Unique Households". For mail merge purposes, I have seen several different solutions.
In my opinion, you do not need the names in seperate fields. Most of the time, when you are retrieving households on the report, you will have household_first_name and household_last_name. The household_first_name field will be a representation of the head and spouse of the household. So on the mail merge field, you would select household_first_name as the first_name and household_last_name as the last_name.
In some instances, you may even get just one field called household_name which would be the head and spouse with their last name (i.e. John (head) and Jane (spouse) Smith). On the mail merge, you would choose household_name as the first_name and leave the last_name unmatched (or vice versa).
The tricky part comes to matching the fields in the excel file to the mail merge fields.
Thanks,
Lance
Lance Dacy
Director | Customer Services
Fellowship Technologies