Merge w/Access

S

Sue

We recently upgraded from Word for Win95 to MS Office XP
Pro. We have several forms(letters, envelopes,
certificates of service, etc.) in Word that merge with
tables in our Access database...these all converted fine
(boy were were lucky!). However, we have several new
merge documents we need to create and when I attempt to
create one in Word that pulls information from Access, it
doesn't work. In our old version of Word, the <<abc>>
icon was clicked and then the "find" icon. We
were "finding" the case number field on an Access table.
Once that field or information was located, the remaining
blank fields were merged automatically. With the new
letter, these icons are greyed out. It's very possible
I'm going at it from the wrong angle, but I started the
process using Tools; Mail Merge and went from there.

To top it all off, I'm a new Word user (coming from WP);
none of the current staff were employed when the original
letters were created... so, we could really use some help
and maybe a pointer to a good Word/Access reference
book! Fortunately, I'm fairly familiar with Access... if
that helps.

Thanks for any assistance!
 
P

Peter Jamieson

With the new
letter, these icons are greyed out. It's very possible
I'm going at it from the wrong angle, but I started the
process using Tools; Mail Merge and went from there.

The <<ABC>> icon should be available if the insertion point is in a mail
merge main document with a data source attached and at least one
"MERGEFIELD" field or other mailmerge field such as ADDRESSBLOCK has been
inserted into the document.

When you use the Mail merge wizard, the document would typically be in this
state once you had got to Step 4 of 6 "Write your letter" and entered one of
the things listed there, e.g. Address block, More items... etc. In step 5
you should see the new wizard's version of the "Find" facility. If you have
got beyond step 6 then you are probably looking at the /output/ of the
merge, which is not a mail merge main document, and I suspect this is what
may have happened in your case. In earlier versions of Word, you only ever
see the merge toolbar when you are looking at a mail merge main document -
the toolbar is automatically displayed for those documents, and hidden for
documents which are not mail merge main documents. In Word 2003, the toolbar
is not displayed/hidden automatically in this way, but for non-mail merge
documents only the first couple of buttons wll be available.
 

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