International address formats

[Christine Moon]

I have a need to produce address labels for addresses in various countries -
predominately the UK, but also including addresses in the USA, Australia,
New Zealand and several European countries. I use an Outlook Contacts list
as the data source. Outlook correctly formats all these addresses, and in
Word 2000 the correct formats were merged onto the labels by use of the
'mailing address' field. This also excluded the Country for UK addresses.
Now I have Office XP, including Word 2002 (SP-2) I can no longer do this
task easily. The only way I can find to do it is to insert the individual
address fields in the UK format, then edit the individual labels for each
foreign address, moving the address elements around and typing in the
countries manually. This is time-consuming, and it seems odd to me that
something that was simple in an earlier version of the software has become
more difficult in this later version.

Can anyone offer advice?

Christine Moon
(e-mail address removed)
www.fojd.org.uk

 

[Peter Jamieson]

The trouble is that the default mechanism provided in Word 2002 for
connecting to Outlook COntacts (where you select a contacts folder within
the Mail Merge wizard) does not provide a "Mailing address" field with the
complete address. There are now at least 3 ways to connect to your Outlook
data, and the other two do allow you to use this field.
a. The old way. A simple way to use the old method is probably as follows:
- create an empty file (e.g. using Notepad), and rename it so that it has
a .olk extension. e.g. suppose you call it c:\ab\ab.olk.
- check Word Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversions at open"
- go through the connection process. When you get to the Select Data
SOurce dalog, select Files of Type "All files", then locate and select
ab.olk and click Open. You should see a list of connection methods. Choose
the "Outlook Address Book via Converter" option. You should then be able to
insert the complete /postal/ address using the field named Postal_Address
b. The new way. Start Outlook, select your contacts folder, then choose
Outlook Tools|Mail Merge... Have a good look at the dialog box as there are
plenty of options. When you set up the labels (and you should be able to
specify an existing label mail merge main document), use the field named
Mailing_Address.

Apart from the fact that you have to start Outlook and initate from Outlook,
the "New way" has many advantages - record selection can be done with more
precision in Outlook, almost every field in the contact/contact folder is
made available to Word (unlike in either of the other methods) and the
intermediate data source that the process creates is a Word document which
you can save and edit if that is useful.

 

[Christine Moon]

Thank you. I tried the 'new' way, and it works fine from a contacts
sub-folder (which is the way I always did it when using Word anyway).

Then I thought I'd try the filtering from Outlook using the 'Customise
Current View' option, but that didn't work correctly. The merge ignored the
filters and produced a label for everyone in my folder, in fact many people
got more than one label (I think because a copy of their details existed in
another sub-folder also designated as an Outlook address book). I also
tried saving the original Word main document and re-using it, but got a
message box saying that the fields I had used (first_name, last_name and
postal_address) did not exist. There was an option to delete or replace
them (I chose full_name and mailing_address) but whatever I did in this
dialog it would not go away and I was unable to do anything except use the
task manager to 'kill' Word.

Christine
(e-mail address removed)
www.fojd.org.uk

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Unfortunately froma debugging perspective, when I tried this here (but with
a fairly small amount of data) (Office 2002 SP2) everything seemed to work
as expected, as long as I selected Contacts|"All contacts in current view"
and "Fields to merge"|"All contact fields". FWIW, by mistake I selected
""Fields to merge"|"Contact fields in current view" the first time around
and in that case first_name etc. did disappear as they were not selected in
the view I had chosen. I wonder if something similar may have happened to
you. Also, I wouldn't expect "Postal_address" to be available using this
method.

It may be worth using the Outlook Tools|Mail merge option to save the
intermediate WOrd .doc file that Outlook creates and have a look at the
addresses stored in there to see what has actually been exported.

[I doubt if this is relevant, but another thing to be careful about is that
when you insert Merge fields in Word 2002, you can either choose from what
Word calls "Database fields" and what it calls "Address fields". IMO these
names are not very clear when the data source is
a. an address list
b. not something a lot of people would think of as a "database"

If you choose the "Database fields", you get a list of the actual field
names in the data source. In this case, the names are "First_name" etc. If
you choose "Address fields", you get a list of of names provided by Word
that are "mapped" to the actual field names. In this case, you see "First
name" (no underscore) and so on, and the \m switch in the MERGEFIELD field.
Word attempts to do some mappings on the basis of the actual field names but
leaves many fields unmapped.]