mail merge recipient fields display in selected order

[AuctionJan]

The Mail Merge Recipients box displays columns such as Last Name, First
Name, Address, City, State, Zip, and Customer ID #. How can I rearrange the
columns so that my Customer ID # is the first column I see and not way over
on the right hand side of the screen?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

You can drag and drop the column within the recipients box, each time you
open the box, but I do not think anyone knows a way to save the settings so
that the dialog box remembers the seqeunce of columns that you specified.

Peter Jamieson

 

[AuctionJan]

I agree. I know I can drag it over, but we do mail merges MANY times each
day and the best way to assure the correct names are chosen is to use the
unique customer ID. What's strange is that the Customer ID is a unique
number assigned by our Access database and it is the FIRST data field in the
Access record. Why it has to be way after all the other data fields during
the mail merge is beyond me.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I dont work for Microsoft and can only guess what drives their user
interface design.

The only thing I can suggest is that you experiment with naming every column
in your data source in such a way that the columns appear in the sequence
you want. My guess is that Microsoft's software tries to match standard
address column names such as firstname, lastname, street, city, etc, and
will always present recognised names in a certain sequence. Maybe, if it
makes sense to you, you could name your columns 01_something,
02_somethingelse, and so on, and they will appear in that sequence. Awkward
for the users, maybe, but perhaps better than the alternative. Maybe you
could use an Access query to do it.

Peter Jamieson