Contacts not visible from within Word 2003 Mail Merge

[Gary Cooper]

I've been using Office 2000 for quite some time (non-Exchange environment). I had an Outlook.pst and an Archive.pst. I have now got a new PC with Office 2003. I have copied my two files across and am now using them

Initially, I had a problem where the Address Book listed two sets of Contacts address lists, one was empty and the other was what I expected to see. I deleted the empty entry (within Address Book). Everything seemed to be working fine.

I then spotted the Business Contacts Manager CD and so installed that as Administrator and said yes to start using it. When I logged on with the user name that was using my Outlook.pst and Archive.pst files, I kept saying no when it asked if I wanted to use BCM (wanting to understand the implications before I did anything that I might later regret). Before I started using BCM, I uninstalled it (I want to use my Outlook data with my iPAQ h2220 and it appeared that I wouldn't be able to)

Now, I’ve got the situation when I go into Word 2003 and try to do a mail merge, it lists a Contacts folder in my Archive file, but I can’t get to see the Contacts folder in my Outlook file

There’s quite a few things here, but my issue at the moment is the mail merge issue
I’ve included the other stuff, because I wasn’t sure if it was relevant

Any suggestions would be most welcome

Thanks

Gary

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Easiest solution is to switch in Outlook to the contacts folder you want to
use for the merge, then choose Tools | Mail Merge.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

I've been using Office 2000 for quite some time (non-Exchange

environment). I had an Outlook.pst and an Archive.pst. I have now got a new
PC with Office 2003. I have copied my two files across and am now using
them.

Initially, I had a problem where the Address Book listed two sets of

Contacts address lists, one was empty and the other was what I expected to
see. I deleted the empty entry (within Address Book). Everything seemed to
be working fine.

I then spotted the Business Contacts Manager CD and so installed that as

Administrator and said yes to start using it. When I logged on with the user
name that was using my Outlook.pst and Archive.pst files, I kept saying no
when it asked if I wanted to use BCM (wanting to understand the implications
before I did anything that I might later regret). Before I started using
BCM, I uninstalled it (I want to use my Outlook data with my iPAQ h2220 and
it appeared that I wouldn't be able to).

Now, I've got the situation when I go into Word 2003 and try to do a mail

merge, it lists a Contacts folder in my Archive file, but I can't get to see
the Contacts folder in my Outlook file.

 

[Gary Cooper]

Thanks for the suggestion Sue, however i managed to get to the bottom of this one. The bottom line (as far as I'm concerned) is it's a bug (with a work-around)

What was happening was when I tried to do a mail merge in Word 2003, it offered the contacts folder, but when I tried to use it there was about 5 seemingly blank contacts instead of the loads that I expected to see. On further investigation, what it was actually selecting was Inbox | Contacts - I had just glossed over this previously. When I looked at the inbox folder, there was indeed a sub-folder called Contacts (it's my wife's PC BTW, which why I wasn't so familiar with the folder layout)

So what I did was to rename the "Contacts" folder located in Inbox to "Other Contacts" and hey presto the mail merge works fine! This is quite repeatable

Cheers

Gary