Editing Recipients in Word 2007 Mail Merge

[nettiem]

We just updated our Office from 2000 to 2007 and are having trouble with our
mail merges. Is it possible to open the main merge document and from there
open and edit the data source? The data sources are Word tables and we are
sort of able to get to the tables by highlighting the data source and
clicking on edit, but View Source is grayed out and even if we change the
receipient information in the Mail Merge Recipients dialog box it won't let
us save the changes. It askes if we want to save them and then tells us they
are read only. View source always worked well before and it is pretty
necessary since some of our fields are multiple lines (i.e. address, city,
state and zip in one field).

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Broadly speaking, if you were connecting using the default method (DDE) in
Word 2000, Access would be open and you could use it to edit the data
source. That may be the best way to do the same thing in Word 2007 (At
present I cannot check). To make the DDE connection you need to check Word
Office Button->Word Options->Advanced->General->"Confirm file format
conversion on open", go through the process of connecting to your data
source again, and choose the DDE option when it is offered.

I'm not sure you can edit from the Edit Recipients box in this case, unless
the Access database is an "Office Address List", which is in essence a .mdb
created in Word 2002/2003 mailmerge that has a specific table and query
structure.

 

[Graham Mayor]

If your data source is a Word table and you have the data source attached to
your merge document (with an old merge doc it will probably be worth
re-attaching the data source, for as Peter says Word 2007 uses a different
default method of connecting to its data from Word 2000), click the Mailings
Tab, then Edit Recipient List. This will open a dialog box with the records
in the top section and at the bottom there is a section labelled Data Source
with a window showing the path of the attached data source. Select that and
the Edit button below it becomes available. You can add addresses using the
Add Tool. When you have completed your merge and close out of the merge
document Word prompts you to save your data doc. This it will then save
should you agree?

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Peter Jamieson]

Hi Graham,

Incidentally I have now managed to check with an Access .mdb and the process
should be the same or extremely similar for simple tables, which is an
improvement on Word 2003 where AFAIK only OALs are editable from within
Word. There may well be limitations if the data source is a linked table, or
a query (for one thing, not all queries are logically editable anyway).

FWIW there are some limitaitons when you edit some types of data source in
Word 2007 - if the data source is on a network drive, you can go through all
the editing steps you describe then find that Word fails to save the edits
(in fact the messages suggest that it is trying to save a temp file, not the
actual data source. This has been reported to Microsoft but of course I do
not know whether and when the problem will be fixed.

 

[Graham Mayor]

There have been a few reports in the Word forums about problems with saving
Word documents across networks. My comments referred to only what I tested
here on a stand-alone system - and of course the data source was quoted as a
Word table which does tend to make things easier

I agree the mail merge handling is rather better in 2007 than it was in
2003, but there are oddities that can catch you out, such as the merge to
labels automatic adding of line spacing if you follow the logicval merge
process, but not if you start from a template and attach the data source
before changing the document type to labels. Even the dreaded addressblock
field works rather better now.

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Peter Jamieson]

<<
and of course the data source was quoted as a

Word table which does tend to make things easier

Whoops! I've been labouring under the mistaken assumption that it was an
Access table.

There have been a few reports in the Word forums about problems with
saving Word documents across networks.

Yes, there is definitely a problem there, unless it has been fixed in an
update since about 2 months ago.

I agree the mail merge handling is rather better in 2007 than it was in
2003, but there are oddities that can catch you out, such as the merge to
labels automatic adding of line spacing if you follow the logicval merge
process, but not if you start from a template and attach the data source
before changing the document type to labels. Even the dreaded addressblock
field works rather better now.

There certaily seems to be quite a mix. I get the impression they might have
planned to do a lot more with the "content controls" but couldn't get it all
into this release, but maybe they have now decided that anything beyond a
basic merge is going to require programming.

 

[nettiem]

Thank you both for your information. If I understand correctly, there is no
good way to edit the recipients in the data source as long as they data
source is a Word table. I tried creating a new recipient list letting Word
decide how to do it. I kept the list on the server and was able to get into
it by clicking on Edit Recipient List, choosing file name under Data Source
and clicking Edit. It was a pain though - deleting a bunch of field names I
didn't want and creating new ones. On a whim, I tried copying the Word table
into Excel and attaching the Excel document as the data source. It worked.
I was able to get to and edit the records from the main mail merge document
and actually save the changes. Of course, I still can't open the actual data
source document so I can't enter multi-line fields, but I guess it's closer
to what we had before. Now we're having trouble with the merges that connect
to Access. The Word documents are acting like they can't find their Access
data sources and when you try to connect them using the Select Recipients,
not all of the tables and queries show up on the list. Frustrating. Do you
think there's any chance Microsoft is going to make the mail merge easier to
use?

 

[Graham Mayor]

If the data source is a Word table then what I said was that the in-built
functions to edit the data source (adding and deleting records) works just
fine. It is only with more complex data sources that you could have
problems.
Using multi-line fields was never a good plan. Use a field for each line.

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[nettiem]

Adding and deleting records does work, but we still can't save the changes.
Not being able to have two line fields is disappointing, but we can live with
it. Do you know why the mail merge would not give us a complete list of all
the tables and queries when we connect it to Access as the data source?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

it. Do you know why the mail merge would not give us a complete list of

all
the tables and queries when we connect it to Access as the data source?

By default, Word 2007 connects using OLE DB, which
a. does not "see" certain query and table types (e.g. it does not see
parameter queries, tables linked via ODBC, queries that use Access VBA
user-defined functions, and queries that use the financial series functions)
b. does not return any records if you connect to queries that use the old
wildcard characters * and ?, which is a problem if you are using Access 2007
because the facility to get it to recognise the new ones % and _ is at best
well hidden and AFAIK may not work at all.