BCM Update made things worse

[Rebecca Dell]

Hi all
I installed the Office 2203 Update and SP for BCM and it has made (the
already cumbesome) mail merge worse. I had been using a Word Document for
delivery instructions to our haulier by dropping in the customer name &
details held in BCM by editing the recipient list. The update has somehow
mismatched the datafields so that now the "Account_Name" and
"Primary_Contact" fields are blank and worse still there is no replacement!
The "First_Name" and "Last_Name" fields are now an mixture of the company
name rather than of any contact. It's all over the place really.
I really really want BCM to work because I put a lot of effort in setting up
all the accounts and contacts etc but it's a bit of a mess for a program by
such a high profile company. Are they going to release an update that would
make it workable?
Thanks
Rebecca

 

[Luther]

The Account folder in BCM is apparently intended for companies and
institutions, and just happens to inherit all the fields from Outlook
Contacts. The Accounts then have children Business Contacts that
represent the people you actually interact with.

If you want to communicate with people (send emails, automate phone
calls, mail merge, etc.) you should use Business Contacts.

 

[Rebecca Dell]

Hi Luther
I just wanted to list the primary contact name. This used to be possible and
was working fine but is now available but blank in Word Mail Merge (but there
in BCM itself). AccountName and Company fields are also there but blank - the
only way to list the company/account name is as "Display Name". It is
definitely not working smoothly.
Rebecca

 

[erik]

I ran into a similar problem with my merge documents. The fix was to open
accounts in phone list view and add the columns I needed for the merge. This
allowed me to see the account address and the primary contact name at the
same time in the word mail merge. When I change the accounts view I loose
some of the merge information, so I maintain a default view with all the data
needed for the merge.

How nice it would be to define the merge query and ignore the open view in
BCM.

 

[Rebecca Dell]

Thanks Erik. Nearly have it sorted now but Word is bringing up a File
Conversaion Dialogue box now and I have to confirm that the Accounts info is
coming in in "unicode" each time. Would you know how to turn this off?

Also, Word gives warnings about running SQL commands when opening merged
docs. How do i switch this off?

Thanks
Rebecca

 

[Luther]

If you don't get an answer here, you could try your question in the
microsoft.public.word group.

The unicode warning is a little strange because Office11 is supposed to
use Unicode by default. If anything they should be warning you when the
info is not in Unicode as that's more likely to lead to munged text.