mail merging labels

[Pat S]

Am working in MS Word XP Professional. Our office works with a
continually changing client base. I've used the Mail Merge Wizard to
try to create a simple format for the end user to just type in the
address information and produce labels. In the wizard when it says
Select Recipients, I selected Type New List. I customized the My
Address Information form, close, and it prompts me to save this as
..mdb. The problem is the next time labels need to be created, the
addresses that were entered in the Mail Merge Recipients form are
still there from before. Of course we can delete each of those
addresses one by one but that's not ideal. How can I get the info
entered in the Mail Merge Recipient form to go away?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Pat S

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Pat,

I've used the Mail Merge Wizard to
try to create a simple format for the end user to just type in the
address information and produce labels. In the wizard when it says
Select Recipients, I selected Type New List. I customized the My
Address Information form, close, and it prompts me to save this as
..mdb. The problem is the next time labels need to be created, the
addresses that were entered in the Mail Merge Recipients form are
still there from before. Of course we can delete each of those
addresses one by one but that's not ideal. How can I get the info
entered in the Mail Merge Recipient form to go away?

Mmmmm. Word's not really set up to work that way. Most people want to
save their addresses to re-use!

I can't think of any simple way you can do this with just the user
interface Word provides. In order to make this transparent to your
users, you'd need to use some VBA (a macro).

My inclination would be to create your own VBA UserForm with the
address fields. The code behind the form would write the entries to a
Word table or delimited text file, and would delete the existing file
each time its re-used.

Alternate approaches would be to use ADO (data manipulation) to empty
the attached Access database (*.mdb) each time the document is
opened.

Or to use Access or Excel for the data sources, directly. This would
even be possible without doing any (or much) programming.

Something else to consider would be to pull up the older Mail Merge
interface that creates a Word table instead of a *.mdb file. Word
stil won't empty this automatically, but the table can be opened and
the rows deleted fairly easily.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep 30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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