"Joshua Randall Jr. and Cynthia Smith" not working properly

[Micah P]

I am attempting to use a mail merge in Word XP, with my Outlook contact list.
I have "Spouse First Name" and "Spouse Last Name" defined as User Fields 1
and 2.

When I am addressing the letter, I would like to use "Joshua Randall Jr. and
Cynthia Smith" as the format. However, when there is no Spouse defined, the
letter is being addressed to "The Randall Family" and not, as I would hope
and expect, to "Joshua Randall Jr."

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Is there a good way to fix it?

Incidentally, the greeting works correctly (i.e. "Dear Joshua and Cynthia"
when a spouse is defined, and "Dear Joshua" when no spouse exists).

Thank you.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I get the same here. It looks like an error in Word to me. Your best bet is
probably to use individual fields to do the first (name) line of the
address, and uncheck the "Insert recipient's name" option in the
Addressblock options. Unfortunately the "field names" used within the
ADDRESSBLOCK - you see them if you use Alt-F9 to show the internal structure
of the field - are not officially documented and although some of the
behaviour of the field can be deduced from experimentand modified, the
construction of the name line in the ADDRESSBLOCK field appears to be
hard-coded - changing the "fields" in that line does not usually have the
effect you might expect.

For the name line I think you would need at least the following, making a
number of assumptions, e.g. you don't need special processing to deal with a
missing main first name or last name, and where there is a spouse you always
have a spouse first name:

{ MERGEFIELD First_Name }{ MERGEFIELD Last_Name \b " " }{ MERGEFIELD Suffix
\b " " }{ MERGEFIELD User_Field_1 \b " and " }{ MERGEFIELD User_Field_2 \b "
" }

All the {} need to be the special field braces you can insert using ctrl-F9