mail merge single letter quickly

[Ed Marmon]

How do i set up a template to mail merge a single letter ( with salutation
and other fields of course ) quickly to one BCM contact. They cant answer
the question in that group satisfactorily. I dont wish to go through the
wizard and 8-12 clicks in total. I just wish to design a template with
merge fields, have 10-20 of these appear on a menu, and then just pick one
from teh menu to merge to the current contact, ready to fax or email with
an extra click.

In act! and goldmine contact managers you can do this in 3 clicks with Word
or their built-in word processor. Please help me make the transition to
office and bcm by showing me how here.

Thanks for any guidance. Again, I just want to shoot a predefined letter to
a single contact, not a large group mail merge.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Turn on the Mail Merge toolbar by selecting Toolbars from the View menu and
check the Mail Merge item. Then use that rather than the Wizard.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Ed Marmon]

I have a ribbon, not a toolbar.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I don't use BCM but a brief look suggests to me that
a. if you want to select a BCM contact in one of the standard Outlook views
you would probably be able to do what you need using some Outlook VBA code,
which would be very similar to the code used to generate a letter for any
contact. You may be able to find code for that at www.slipstick.com. I also
have some somewhere but it hasn't been in service for a long time.
b. if you want to select a BCM contact in the view where you see all the
contacts for an account, things may be very different. Without looking much
more deeply into the Outlook and BCM object models, I can't tell whether it
is possible to work out which contact(s) you have selected in that list.
Further, there does not appear to be any configurable drop-down menu
associated with the contacts in that view, so you might have to start from a
button in the toolbar, or modify the ribbon
c. although you can add a small number of "traditional" buttons to the user
interface, to do anything with the ribbon I believe you have to code in
Visual Studio.NET with Visual Studio Tools for Office. Unlike VBA, that
stuff is not built into Office and is (in my opinion) a completely different
ball game for an end user to get to grips with.

I don't know why MS does not put really obvious stuff like this into their
software but if the facility is built-in I'm sure the BCM people would have
known about it. At the very least it might be worth asking them if they
think the above summary is reasonably close to the mark.

Peter Jamieson

 

[sophiejena]

Thanks for the thoughtful answer. If anyone deserves a consultancy fee, I
think it is you!