Windows Contacts Mail Merge Address Labels - Multi Line Addresses

[JohnMike]

Dear All,

I want to complete a mail merge in word to print out address labels. The
addressing data has been entered via windows contacts on a vista pc.

Following the prescribed method I have exported the contacts to a CSV file.
Imported that to an Excel Sheet and completed the usual merge processes.

The problem lies with addresses containing 2 or more lines with in the
Windows Contacts.

These get exported in the following format name,"address line1 address
line2",state etc etc

When imported into the Excel sheet we then get

r1 name address line1
r2 address line2

Which obviously then fails to merge correctly.

I have manually edited the CSV and the Excel files to compensate for this
and get a successful merge. But this seems like hard work. Surely other users
have multi line addresses and want to use this data in word.

Please can some one advise.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Windows Contacts?
Word uses Outlook Contacts as its address book and merging from Outlook
contacts is fairly straightforward
http://www.gmayor.com/mailmerge_from_outlook.htm
Word can use a variety of data sources - including csv files - directly. It
is not necessary to export them to Excel. In any case you would have fewer
potential problems if you used a Word table rather than an Excel table - see
http://www.gmayor.com/convert_labels_into_mail_merge.htm
If the result of your exported data source is that you have some fields that
contain two pieces of information then what you see is how it will merge.
Have you tried merging the data file without converting it?
See http://www.gmayor.com/mail_merge_labels_with_word_xp.htm or
http://www.gmayor.com/merge_labels_with_word_2007.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[JohnMike]

Hi Graham,

Many thanks for this information and your help. I may of course be being
stupid (which is quite likely). However on my Vista Machine I do not have
anything called Outlook. I have windows mail and windows contacts and other
utilities like calander etc. This has been being used in place of outlook.

I assumed that these were standard vista utilities taking the place of
outlook.

I will see if I can track down the office cd's with a view to installing
outlook, but I do not think that any were supplied with the machine. From
your notes it appears that merging from the outlook contacts is the best
solution.

I will let you know how I get on.

 

[Graham Mayor]

I don't use Vista so I don't know anything about the Vista contacts manager.
From the information I can find on the web, it would seem that exporting to
CSV is the only practical solution for using the data - much as was the case
with the old Windows Address Book. If you have Outlook (part of Office) then
that would be a way forward. Otherwise mail merge is going to be a clumsy
process as you have found.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Peter Jamieson]

I think in this case the problem arises because of what happens when you
open the exported text file in Excel. Are you seeing an import dialog where
you have to specify the delimiter characters etc.?

If so, I do not think anything you specify in there will let you import the
file correctly, because it does not appear to know how to import standard
delimited text files.

However,
a. if you open the file in from Windows Explorer using Excel, Excel /does/
get it right - at least it does here when I save the file as a .txt file.
(You may have to select the program you want to use, and you probably should
not set up Excel as the default for .txt files).
b. you should be able to use the file exported from Windows Contacts
directly as a data source for a merge, without having to go via Excel.

Both of those routes will almost certainly fail if any of your data has
double quote characters in it, because Windows Contacts (like Outlook
Express before it, AFAIK), does not take account of the standard rules for
formatting delimited text files.

There is another way to approach this, but it requires some code which I'll
have to think about.