Mailmerge conversion 2003-2007

[petemul]

Hi,
I'm having problems attempting to upgrade some old maimerge documents from
2003-2007. The old system used a word document with merge fields and an
attached header source document, the datasource word document was then
dynamically created based on a requirement (Access, SQL Server etc) using VBA
and the mailmerge performed.

I can't seem to find a way to adapt this using the 2007 mailmerge
functionality.

Also when attempting to perform a mail merge from two separate word
documents (header and source), this appears to work fine the first time I
attach the header, however when re-opening the main document, it appears to
'lose' the header. Am I doing something silly here?

Any help would be much appreciated...

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Am I doing something silly here?

I doubt it, but I haven't even looked at what Word 2007 has done to this
area of MailMerge because it was already "deprecated" back in Word 2002.

The traditional reason for using a header source was to allow the user to
insert Mergefields and develop the document layout even before a full data
source was attached. However, if you are creating/using your documents
programmatically, you can insert MERGEFIELD fields even into a non-mail
merge main document. Even if you need to provide something similar to the
"header source" approach for users, you can probably work around by having
an actual data source with the correct names (and perhaps a dummy record)
and replace it by the real source later. In other words, if you can, I'd get
rid of header sources altogether.

Peter Jamieson