Help Data Source for Word mail merge

[Perico]

My client has a Word 2000 doc (it might be a Word 2002 doc)
with fields within for mail merge.

I need to identify the odc or the data source. When I go
to Step 3 of the data connection (mail merge) Wizard I see
fields but nothing indicating the datasource.

Two Questions:
1. How do I identify the datasource?
2. If I link directly to MS SQL database, which seems to
be one of the two "New connection" options, it seems I am
limited to linking to a table and not a query. Is this
true?

I'm not sure where to post this.

 

[Perico]

This is a Word XP document.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Perico,

My client has a Word 2000 doc (it might be a Word 2002 doc)
with fields within for mail merge.

I need to identify the odc or the data source. When I go
to Step 3 of the data connection (mail merge) Wizard I see
fields but nothing indicating the datasource.

Two Questions:
1. How do I identify the datasource?
2. If I link directly to MS SQL database, which seems to
be one of the two "New connection" options, it seems I am
limited to linking to a table and not a query. Is this
true?

I'm not sure where to post this.

Probably the word.mailmerge.fields group would have been most
appropriate. Anyway...

If we're just talking about the User Interface, and not
programming, then you can go into Help/About/System Info.
Under the Office Applications branch you should find
Word/Mail merge, and the full path to the data source is
listed there.

If the data connection was made with OLE DB, and includes a
*.odc, then there's really no good way to extract the path to
the data source using VBA, with the possible exception of
parsing the *.odc file (if you can find out which one it is).
With ODBC as the connection method you CAN get the
ConnectionString property using VBA with no problems.

In both cases, mail merge should be able to link to any VIEW
you've set up in SQL Server.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep
30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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