Mail Merge Toolbar Disabled

[Kara]

In Word 2000 when I opened up a Mail Merge document the Mail Merge toolbar
would automatically open. In Word 2003 I have to manually open the toolbar.
How do I get the Mail Merge toolbar to automatically open with my Mail Merge
documents?

Thanks,
Kara

 

[Doug Robbins]

My experience with Word 2003 is that once having selected the Mailmerge
toolbar under View>Toolbars, it is always displayed, though all but the
first buttons on it are disabled if a merge document is not the active
document and that if you are starting a merge from scratch, after selecting
the type of merge that you are going to create (Letters, Labels, Envelopes,
Email, Directory), then initially on the the Open Data source button is
enabled and only after attaching the data source are the balance of the
buttons on the toolbar enabled.

If the toolbar is not being displayed from one session to the next, maybe
your IT Dictatorship is screwing around with things everytime you log onto
their network.

You can get around that by creating an Addin (a template that you store in
the Word\Startup folder) that contains an autoexec macro that turns on the
toolbar.

--
Please respond to the Newsgroup for the benefit of others who may be
interested. Questions sent directly to me will only be answered on a paid
consulting basis.

Hope this helps,
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[grahambread]

The essential tool to make this work seems to be the 'Mail Merge
Helper' (MMH) dialogue, which doesn't get used by default in Word2003.
In short if you use this tool to create a new or modify an existing MM
document it will subsequently display the MM toolbar when opening the
doc and remove it when closing.

What I have now done is to install the MMH button on my standard
toolbar. You can find it in Tools/Customize/Commands/All Commands/. The
button remains 'active' even if the current doc is not MM. Open a new
blank document and click on the MMH button to get the dialogue to
create a MM document (as we used to in Word 2000). Once you have linked
to your data source the MM toolbar will behave in the 'old' way. This
has worked for me with new docs and with old ones that previously had
not automatically displayed the toolbar in Word2003 but will do once I
reconnect to the data sorce using the MMH dialogue and then save the
doc.

Best wishes
Graham