unable to Mail Merge in managed environment

[Clint McIntosh]

We are managing all our OSX 10.2.6 machines via MCX (aka WGM) and
when any of the students or teachers try to do a mail merge with Office
v.X (10.1.3 updates) it fails. When they click on the button to Get data,
they can navigate through their files & folders and pick the excel
spreadsheet they have created and as soon as they click ok Open, they
get an error that says "Unable to open data source" and that's it. If I
perform the exact same task with the exact same files on an
unmanaged machine it works just fine. I have done chmod 777 on
the Microsoft Office X folder in /Applications and all the files & folders
within have full read & write permissions but the mail merge still fails
every time on the managed machines.
We have classes that depend on this function to work and the faculty
& students aren't too happy about this. Removing the machines from
being managed is not an option.
Can anyone tell me how to fix this??

Clint McIntosh -- (e-mail address removed)

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

We are managing all our OSX 10.2.6 machines via MCX (aka WGM) and
when any of the students or teachers try to do a mail merge with Office
v.X (10.1.3 updates) it fails. When they click on the button to Get data,
they can navigate through their files & folders and pick the excel
spreadsheet they have created and as soon as they click ok Open, they
get an error that says "Unable to open data source" and that's it. If I
perform the exact same task with the exact same files on an
unmanaged machine it works just fine. I have done chmod 777 on
the Microsoft Office X folder in /Applications and all the files & folders
within have full read & write permissions but the mail merge still fails
every time on the managed machines.
We have classes that depend on this function to work and the faculty
& students aren't too happy about this. Removing the machines from
being managed is not an option.
Can anyone tell me how to fix this??

Don't you think you should ask the company that makes the management
software? They're the ones screwing things up. I would have said to set
permissions correctly, but you've already done that.

What happens if they try to use their identity's copy of the Office Address
Book as the Data Source - you can select by category and/or by individual
contact when you get to the bottom and click Query button. So if the data is
in the Office Address Book (i.e. Entourage Address Book, but you can get
there from Word/Tools/Office Address Book as well), assigning categories to
subsets of contacts would provide a solution. If there's tons of data in the
Excel spreadsheet that's not in the Address Book, you can get it in if these
are contacts by Saving As Tab-Delimited Text file and then using
File/Import/Contacts in Entourage. If you end up with a million unwanted
quote marks and such-like, you could look into my shareware "Export-Import
Entourage X" scripts from

MacScripter.net <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

The Excel Import Adapter or Save Clean Text (easier) scripts in the Xcel
Extras folder will do it if you need it.

But I don't see why any of this should be necessary. Is the spreadsheet or -
more likely - Word - on a server? It could be that you can't set permissions
correctly on a remote server.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage
Entourage FAQ Page: http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html

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