Edit Mail Merge Recipient -This is not a valid Office Data store.

[wop-mha]

In MS Word creating a mail merge letter using an MS Access .mdb data source,
I select Mail Merge Recipients/Edit to open and/or modify the data. This has
worked before and currently in other documents, but something has happened
and my Edit is Disabled. I used a different Edit Mail Merge Recipient
toolbar button and recieved: X This is not a valid Office Data Store.

Is this an Access problem or a Word problem?

How do I correct the problem so that my Edit button reactivates in Mail
Merge Recipient?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Word (2002/2003) will only let you edit .mdb s that it decides are "Office
Address Lists" (OALs) - i.e., the ones that are created when you create a
new list in Mail Merge. These .mdbs have a very specifc structure, e.g. they
have one table, one query, a certain set of fields, and so on. Many
alterations to that structure will cause Word to stop recognising the .mdb
as an OAL - e.g. if you happened to add a couple of tables. The trouble is
that even opening the OAL in Access and editing it may be enough to do that.

I'm not sure that is what has happened in this case but it seems quite
possible. if you can revert to an earlier version of your .mdb (i.e. have a
suitable backup, and can easily redo any changes that you actually want) I
would do that. Otherwise, I think you will have to reconstruct the OAL from
scratch. Unfortunately, if there is a reliable way to recover it using
Access, I do not know what it is.

Peter Jamieson