Mail Merge - Urgent

[Irene]

When I try to open Outlook 2003 contacts in Publisher 2003 and Word 2003 to
do a mail merge, I get the following message: The operation cannot be
completed because of dialog or datgabase engine failures. Please try again
later.

I have been doing this successfully without a problem and then all of a
sudden I cannot.

I have been in the Publisher group and did everything I was told to do,
still no luck. the problem is in Outlook.

Thank you

 

[Peter Jamieson]

the problem is in Outlook.

It probably isn't even in Outlook, but in the OLE DB software that Word uses
to get data from Outlook.

It's often simpler to initiate your merge starting from Outlook - select
some contacts, then use Outlook Tools|Mail Merge... It's designed to work
with Word and I'm not sure it will get you anywhere if you only have Outlook
and Publisher, but it sounds like you have Word anyway.

If you actually want to merge to Publisher, not Word, then proceed as if you
are merging with Word, and make sure you check the "Permanent file" option
and provide the name of a file for the exported contacts. Don't give the
file an extension like .doc or .txt - Outlook actually saves the file with a
..doc extension anyway. However, it isn't actually a Word .doc file, so
before you can use it as a data source in Publisher, you need to locate the
file in Windows Explorer and change the extension from .doc to .txt.

When you select the file in Publisher for use as a Data Source, you should
see a dialog box titled "Text File Connection Parameters". Select "Comma"
and leave "First row of data contains column headers" checked.

Peter Jamieson