About Mail Merge

[Edward]

Recently one of my colleagues ask me about the question in "Mail
Merge", but I have only a little experience on it, so just wanna see if
there are any expert can tell me about it.

She has been using Office 98 (98) for sometime, usually she will use
word to import a file from the excel to do the mail merge job, but got
some difficulties when she switch to use Office 2003 (03)

1) From her 98 experiences, import from excel won't make the excel file
read only, in between the mail merge (say, checking the printout or
merge result), she can edit the excel data at any time and then the
data will be updated acoordingly in the word, but it's not the case in
03. For anychanges she must close the word application, edit the excel
and redo the job again.

2) In 98 the mail merge will follow _exactly_ the format from excel
(e.g., price dollar sign, format of dates), and whenever the format
changed in excel, word will display the update format. For now it seems
it's not easy to control, e.g. ,for date, sometimes it display the date
number string, sometimes other formats, but don't follow the format in
excel.

3) In the 3rd step for mail merge (select the worksheet from a excel
file), you can select the desired fields to import (checkbox), in 98
this interface can allow user to edit the excel data directly and then
reflect immediately in the merge result. Or call out the excel file for
edit. but in 03 there are no choice to do this.


May I know all these is a configuration problem or use method or just a
funtionality change in the new version?

Thnaks!

 

[Mike]

Its always a good idea to have set of rules in your mind on how you are
going to operate a particular application or applications. Therefore
before even opening word for mail-merge ensure your database is up to
date and accurate. This will ensure you don't have to edit the
database whilst creating your merged file.

With each release of Office, MS tend to change procedures and methods
for particular operations, sometimes this makes life easier, sometimes
this makes life awkward. With a new application always have a practise
with what you are trying to do to ensure the outcome is what you
expect.

I have never used dates in mail-merge, however there are several
different numerical formatting methods with Excel, its quite common for
Excel files to have different formatting methods to achieve the same
result (at least within Excel).

One last point always ensure your version of Office has all the latest
updates.

Regards,
Mike