\d switch not honoured in Word 2007 mailmerge to email -MS CRM

[Belgarion2]

Hi All,

I'm using CRM 4.0 Campaigns and trying to use Mail Merge Templates to send
emails. In the MM template I have something like the following:

{ INCLUDEPICTURE "http://www.mysite.com/images/picture1.jpg" \d }

When I do the mail merge to email, the \d switch is not honoured and the
image gets included in the email rather than resolved if the user opens the
email and selects 'download pictures'.

This is very annoying as this consumes bandwidth (both mine and my
customers) when many of my customers are not interested in the pictures and
are quite happy with the text. And even more annoying for customers who only
occasionally read the emails but must suffer larger email download times even
when the email (a newsletter) is infrequently read.

I've spent about a day trying to work out what is going on but to no avail.
Is this a bug? Or is this the way it will now be in Word 2007? Either way - I
was hoping this Word 2007 and CRM 4.0 integration would make this easier -
Doesn't seem to though.

Is there anyone in either the Word 2007 or MS CRM 4.0 community who can
confirm whether this does work? I.e. that the INCLUDEPICTUIRE field does in
fact honour the \d switch when mail merging to email?

 

[macropod]

Hi Belgarion2,

Perhaps a hyperlink field would be better suited to your needs.

Cheers

 

[Peter Jamieson]

FWIW Word versions seem to vary (even between SPs) on this one. What used to
work was

{ QUOTE { INCLUDEPICTURE "your URL" \d } }

at least it worked earlier this year on Word 2003 on my system.
Incidentally, at that time I had quite a good look around the potentially
relevant Outlook and Word settings and could not find anything that affected
what Word/Outlook did in this area. But it's easy to miss stuff. Anyway,
now (perhaps following the SP, or perhaps because of some other change) it
does not work any more.

On Word 2007 SP1 I haven't been able to stop the picture being included
whatever I do. For INCLUDEPICTURE< the lack of any documentation in Word
2007 Help about the field suggests that Microsoft probably want you to use
their new "Content controls" instead, but I couldn't find any way to make
those behave the way you hope either. FWIW you've probably noticed that the
image facilities in WOrd have changed rather a lot, and I get the impression
that Word now typicaly "wants" to include the picture and forget about the
link.