Mail Merge and Distribution Lists

[Kim]

After spending a long and frustrating day trying to work with mail merge, I
have discovered that it is not possible to mail merge from a distribution
list. What is the point of creating a distribution list if you can't use it
to send a personalized email to multiple people? It seems like this should be
the primary function, and mail merge is designed to work with outlook and my
contacts, but not a distribution list, which defeats the purpose of me
creating distribution lists at all.

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...1c13e8392&dg=microsoft.public.outlook.general

 

[Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]]

No, you would use categories to send to a group of people with a mail merge.

Distribution lists were never meant for mail merges, are not robust and have
several limitations.

--
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]

Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact.
ALWAYS post your Outlook version.
How to ask a question: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/555375


After furious head scratching, Kim asked:

| After spending a long and frustrating day trying to work with mail
| merge, I have discovered that it is not possible to mail merge from a
| distribution list. What is the point of creating a distribution list
| if you can't use it to send a personalized email to multiple people?
| It seems like this should be the primary function, and mail merge is
| designed to work with outlook and my contacts, but not a distribution
| list, which defeats the purpose of me creating distribution lists at
| all.
|
| ----------------
| This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
| suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click
| the "I Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the
| button, follow this link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft
| Web-based Newsreader and then click "I Agree" in the message pane.
|
|
http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...1c13e8392&dg=microsoft.public.outlook.general

 

[Peter Jamieson]

1. Unless Microsoft has shown recent signs of responding to these
"suggestion" posts, if you have Office 2007 you're probably better off
making suggestions to Microsoft using the facilities within Office.
Don't hold your breath!

2. The following may be helpful but it was written in 2006 and
references a much earlier posting. FWIW I also find it hard to believe
that Outlook Distribution Lists have not moved on.

-----------------------
If you mean starting from an Outlook Distribution List, there's a big
problem because there are no built-in facilities to merge using such a list.

If you find it fairly easy to select the contacts you want in Outlook, then
you can initiate the merge in Outlook using Tools|Mailmerge. Otherwise, here
are some notes I posted a long time ago:

Distribution lists are geared to Outlook's internal needs. Neither Word
nor Outlook seems to have the facilities that a person doing mailmerge would
obviously need to make use of these lists.

If your distribution lists do not contain any nested distribution lists and
all you need in your merge is the e-mail address and/or the name of each
member in the list, you could consider the following approach
a. select the distribution list item in Outlook
b. use Outlook File|Save As to save the contents of the item as a .txt or
...rtf file.
c. Open the .txt file in Notepad or either file in Word. You should see
something like

---------------------------------------------------
Distribution List Name: the name

Members:

member1name member1address
member2name member2address

---------------------------------------------------

(without the --------------------------------------------)

If you replace the stuff at the top by

Name Address

and remove the paragraph marks at the end of the file, and save the file,
you should be able to use it as a mailmerge data source.

If what you were hoping for is that the distribution lists would be treated
like a list of contact data, with all the data for each contact (name,
title, postal address etc.) available to the merge, there are several
problems:
d. the members in a list do not necessarily correspond to contacts. A
member can be a standalone entries (just a name and address that has no
corresponding entry in your contacts/address book. problem is that the
membdistributin list. A member can be the name of a distribution list. It
may be possible for a member to be other things - I don't know
e. even the entries that you set up by selecting contacts from a list can
be misleading, because the member entry just stores a name and address. The
address can actually be different from the one in the contact/address book
record. There is no "link" to the original contact or distribution list
other than the name/address. The original contact is not necessarily in the
same contact folder.
f. as far as I can tell, there is nothing in each member's data to tell you
whether the member is a contact, a standalone entry, or a distribution list,
except that in thecase of a nested list the address field seems to be blank.

So even processing these entries using VBA is non-trivial in the general
case, although do-able I dare say. There may be some code at
http://www.slipstick.com to do it. If you know that all the members
correspond to contacts in the same folder as the list, or to contacts in a
particular folder, it would probably be quite easy to expand the list using
Outlook VBA.
-----------------------


Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk