Greetings line always says Dear Sir or Madam

[Bob]

I'm doing my very first mail merge from my contacts list
in Outlook 2002 to my Word 2002 document. Everything
worked perfectly except one. No matter which choice I
make for how to print the greetings line, every letter
says "Dear Sir or Madam." The address block works fine
but I can't get the name to also show in the greetings
line. Any and all help greatly appreciated.

Bob

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Hi Bob,

Assuming that you have a field in the datasource that contains the greeting
that you want to use for each record, in the mail merge maindocument the
point where you want the greeting to appear, type the word Dear, then leave
a space and then insert the mergefield that contains the greeting
information by selecting it from the Insert Merge Fields dialog.

To enable display of that dialog, from the View menu, select Toolbars and
check the Mail Merge toolbar. It has buttons on it for everything that you
may want to do with mailmerge and is far less trouble than wrestling with
the Wizard.

Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[hkbs]

To enable display of that dialog, from the View menu, select Toolbars and

check the Mail Merge toolbar. It has buttons on it for everything that you
may want to do with mailmerge and is far less trouble than wrestling with
the Wizard.

Does this apply to Word 2002 only? I have Word 2000 and cannot view the Mail
Merge toolbar without using the wizard. It would be great if I could do
that.
TIA
hkbs

 

[Peter Jamieson]

In Word 2002 and later, the mailmerge tolbar is enabled separately. In Word
2000, whether it appears or not depends on whether the active document is a
mail merge main document, and which buttons are enabled depends on whether a
data source is attached, and so on.

To make the document into a mail merge main document in Word 2000 you "only"
have to use the first option in the MailMergeHelper to select one of the
mail merge main document types. Or you could put a macro in your template
such as

Sub mmmd()
' use the document type you typically create instead of wdCatalog
ActiveDocument.MailMerge.MainDocumentType = wdCatalog
End Sub

and create a button on a toolbar attached to the macro. Click it, your main
document's a merge document and you see the toolbar. However, since the
standard mailmerge toolbar doesn't have separate buttons for OpenDataSource
etc. to make this really useful you would probably need to use
Tools|Customize to drag stuff such as All Commands|MailMergeOpenDataSource
to the standard Mail Merge toolbar. Then you need to save your customisation
settings somewhere in case you ever have to restore them.