Mail merge rearranges columns in Access

[Hcc Ministry Assistant]

I am making a mail merge document (Word) with Access as my data source. When
I click on the mail merge button in the Word document and go to edit recipent
list the columns listed there are in a different arrangement than my data
source. Why? and How can I get them to arrange in the correct order.

IE: Business name should be the first column in the list and it appears
toward the end.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Word has a list of name/address field names that it recognises (or something
like that) and presents columns with those names in a sequence that it
chooses. To avoid that, you really have to consider naming your columns so
that
a. Word does not "recognise" any of the names
b. Word gets the sequence you want

off the top of my head I can't tell you whether Word will also resequence
field names that it does not recognise (perhaps using ANSI character
sequence or some such) but IMO the safest way to do it is
a. give each column name a numeric prefix (e.g. 01, 02, 03 etc.)
b. add a human readable field name after that, e.g. so you have 01name,
02myfield, 03city, etc.