Mailmerge from Word to Outlook using Access Database

[Scott M]

Has anyone had any success doing a mail merge from Word to an email program?

I tried this the other day but ran into some trouble with it.
The issue I had was that I had not set up addresses in Outlook but had them
listed in an Access database, which seemed to cause issues.
I've been listing a number of businesses to contact in a Microsoft Access
table.
A rule has been set in the email address field to make all emails a
hyperlink.
These are temporary details and I don't want to have to do contact details
in my email program for every single business.
Wanting to create a nice mailmerge document in word using one or two fields
from my Access database, I chose the send to email option when finished.
Word had created individual documents for every business and tried to
connect to Access but there appeared to be an error with the email
addresses.
Access seemed to attach a mailto: infront of each email address and says it
can't find details in Outlook.
I guess to create individual emails to the contacts which had relevant
information (being business name) in each email I would have to try and get
Outlook to automatically create individual emails.

Any ideas?

From ScottM

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

This is your problem:

A rule has been set in the email address field to make all emails a
hyperlink

Word/Outlook is just expecting the email address to be plain text.

--
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

 

[Scott M]

Doug,

I managed to sort it out by doing a little experiment using the information
you gave me.
I changed the email field in Access to Text.
Then I had to edit each address by removing the mailto: in each address.
I ran a dummy test in Word and it was able to create emails using both the
mailmerge feature and my Access database.

From Scott M