Emailed Merge Recipent 'Cannot find datasource'

[Cory Blythe]

Our company uses a large number of merge forms with our clients and in the
last 2 weeks the following issue as started to come up.

An employee opens the mail merge, merges the data and selects File->Send To
-> As attachment and sends the document to the client. When the client
receives the document and attempts to open it they receive the following
error.

<Document Name> is a mail merge main document, work cannot find its data
source.
<pathname>/<Document Name>

Another client received this error:
<Document Name> is a mail merge main document. Word cannot find it's data
source.

We have been using these documents for 6 months with no changes and no
occurrences of this issue but in the last 7-10 days it has occurred 6 times.
I am currently trying to determine if the clients have made changes but I'm
hoping someone here is familiar with the issue and can help me head off this
problem.

Thank You

 

[Doug Robbins]

Sounds like the employee is previewing the data in the mailmerge main
document and then sending that rather than executing the mailmerge and
sending the document created thereby.

--
Please respond to the Newsgroup for the benefit of others who may be
interested. Questions sent directly to me will only be answered on a paid
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Hope this helps,
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Cory Blythe]

You are correct hey are just merging the document into the email, what I find
curious is that it still works with 95% of our clients and I'm wondering what
the change was. By adding the extra step of merging to a new document it
seems to solve the problem although I'm no closer to understanding why it
isn't consistant .

Thanks for the reply, if anyone else has any insight it would be appreciated.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I doubt if this is happening, but...

If the client happens to have a similar data source in the place that the
sent document expects (quite possible if you are using an "Office Address
List" as the data source as they all have the same structure by default),
they may well be able to open the document they receive without seeing any
messages. If they can, beware, as the document will obviously not be
displaying the data the sender intends the client to see.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Cory Blythe]

Thanks for the idea but I doubt it as well, the data sources we used are long
Stored Procedure names that would be a million to one for someone else to
match, much less a dozen.