Can Mac "Mail" address book fields be merged into Microsoft Word documents?

[theresa]

My computer friend convinced me to migrate over to Mac's Mail program
for my email and address book. I would like to use the address book
fields such as name, address, etc in word documents to make form
letters.

I've found the mail merge manager, but can't figure out to have it
"find" my mac address book fields.

Is it possible?

Many thanks,

theresa valls

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

My computer friend convinced me to migrate over to Mac's Mail program
for my email and address book. I would like to use the address book
fields such as name, address, etc in word documents to make form
letters.

I've found the mail merge manager, but can't figure out to have it
"find" my mac address book fields.

Your computer friend was foolish to recommend Apple's apps when you already
have paid for Office. Maybe he cannot afford Office himself? Or is a member
of the anti-Microsoft religion? One of the great advantages of Office is the
fact that much of it is integrated. (Of course the iApps are somewhat
integrated too - with each other. There are reasons why you might want them
to use iSync, for example.)

Word's MailMerge uses the Entourage Address Book. Features like this don't
happen "by magic", you know. They have to be implemented, in painstaking
detail, by the developers. Naturally they won't work automatically with
Apple's Address Book. If there were any good reason to be using Mail.app,
Address Book, iCal, etc. you could sync them to Entourage with my Sync
Entourage-Address Book and Sync Entourage-iCal shareware scripts at

MacScripter.net <http://scriptbuilders.net/>

But, frankly, you'd be much better off just using Entourage as your personal
information manager. That's what it's designed to do, and to integrate with
Word for MailMerge and Projects (in Office 2004). If you decide to do this,
you could use the two scripts above free in demo mode to get all your
information back to Entourage. I mean - you can't even export contacts from
Apple's Address Book as tab-delimited text to use a a source file. It's
useless for Word MailMerge.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage
Entourage FAQ Page: http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Entourage you are using - **2004**, X
or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions otherwise.

 

[Matt T]

Your computer friend was foolish to recommend Apple's apps when you already
have paid for Office. Maybe he cannot afford Office himself? Or is a member
of the anti-Microsoft religion? One of the great advantages of Office is the
fact that much of it is integrated. (Of course the iApps are somewhat
integrated too - with each other. There are reasons why you might want them
to use iSync, for example.)

Word's MailMerge uses the Entourage Address Book. Features like this don't
happen "by magic", you know.

Ouch. A tad harsh, don't you think?

MT

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

On 8/16/04 6:57 PM, in article

Ouch. A tad harsh, don't you think?

How so? Office is better in almost every regard than the Apple apps, which
is only natural. It's really great that Apple now provides decent,
functional apps for sending email, storing contacts in an Address Book, and
a floozy calendar, built into the OS for free. They never did this in any
classic Mac OS. But all these apps are more primitive than MS Office, which
is a very expensive suite of apps built up over 5-20 years. (Word and Excel
have been around on the Mac 20 years or so.) I would hope they'd be better,
at that price ($400), and they are.

If you only need basic functionality (and, to be fair, Address Book in
Panther is a rather better than that), that's fine. But if you need
something more sophisticated, you get Office. Some people don't know that
there are Word document "readers" around (now including TextEdit) and that
RTF documents made by apps like TextEdit can be read by others using Word,
and get Office because Word is - equally frankly - pretty well indispensable
in an office environment. Once you've got Office, it's silly not to use
Entourage which is so much better than Mail, Address Book and iCal.

And for doing MailMerge - come on - it's idiotic not to use Word wit
Entourage's Address Book, since it's sitting right there. Why would you ever
want to use the Apple alternatives, aside from 1) religious prejudice (you
hate Microsoft on principle even when it's better) or 2) you want to use
iSync. To accommodate the latter - which is a very good reason but forces
you to sideline Entourage which is better for everything else, I wrote my
Sync scripts to tide you over until Apple and Microsoft coordinate on
synching (which might happen in Tiger and a future release of Entourage that
takes advantage of it).

 

[theresa]

If you only need basic functionality (and, to be fair, Address Book in

Panther is a rather better than that), that's fine. But if you need
something more sophisticated, you get Office.

Turns out we couldn't figure out how to make Entourage a workable
solution for my email requirements. (Admittedly, my computer friend is
mac-centric) And the political discussion is interesting, but "yes" or
"no" would have been super helpful. Should I keep trying to do mail
merge with "mail" or bag the whole thing and start over with
Entourage?

thanks again, in advance

theresa

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Turns out we couldn't figure out how to make Entourage a workable
solution for my email requirements. (Admittedly, my computer friend is
mac-centric) And the political discussion is interesting, but "yes" or
"no" would have been super helpful. Should I keep trying to do mail
merge with "mail" or bag the whole thing and start over with
Entourage?

You _can't_ do mail merge with Mail.app and Word. You can't even export
Address Book.app's contacts as a tab-delimited text file which Word (or
Excel) could use. It's a no-go. That wasn't a "political" discussion. It was
a fact. Entourage happens to be a Mac-only application, by the way, so it's
as Mac-centric as Mail.app or Address Book.app.

If you want to use Word's MailMerge, you have to populate the (Entourage)
Address Book, or else have a structured tab-delimited text file or Excel
file with all the data. So yes, start over with Entourage. You will not have
to do it all manually, however. You can use my Sync Entourage-Address Book
script, from

MacScripter.net <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

If you're in Panther, the [PANTHER] version of that (currently v2.5.2) is
free for 14 days, so you can transfer all your Address Book contacts to
Entourage easily, for free.

thanks again, in advance

You're very welcome.


--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.