Use Outlook contact info (i.e., fax #) in a Word template?

[MaliDoux]

There should be a way to easily send a document created from a template in
Word to an Outlook contact, using the address and fax number information in
Outlook!

Has anyone had success with this?

Thanks!

 

[Hollis Paul]

There should be a way to easily send a document created from a template in
Word to an Outlook contact, using the address and fax number information in
Outlook!

In the world of Word, this is generally referred to as mail merge. Look up
that in the Word help file. You will want to start the mail merge from Word,
as I recall.

 

[MaliDoux]

Thanks so much for your response!

I do know about mail merges however, and it seems a little cumbersome for
just creating a fax coverpage.

What I was actually wishing for was some quick easy way I could, with just a
click or two, create a fax cover page from a contacts information. What I
would love to be able to do is RIGHT CLICK on the contact, and, in the same
way you can send a new email message, create a word document based on an
existing template. Make sense? With the interoperability of the office
suite, this doesn't seem like much of a stretch

Thanks though!

 

[Hollis Paul]

What I
would love to be able to do is RIGHT CLICK on the contact, and, in the same
way you can send a new email message, create a word document based on an
existing template. Make sense? With the interoperability of the office
suite, this doesn't seem like much of a stretch

Thanks though!

It makes sense if you have a fax client that actually functions well.
Microsoft never got their fax software to work properly and has dropped
support of that medium. Outlook used to attempt to start fax sequences from
fax numbers, but it generally was viewed by Outlook experts as being a very
medieval form of torture. With good reason, the communications world has
moved on from fax, and you really need to find some legacy, non-microsoft fax
client that will at least get something sent out.

 

[MaliDoux]

I see what you are saying. However, that is not what i'm trying to do. I
don't want to fax something from my computer - i just want to create a fax
coversheet from the contact information in outlook. I'm a mortgage broker,
and I fax things all day long, to different people. Since the information
I'm needing to fax was received via fax, or is a document that was signed in
the office. So, i have to print a fax coversheet, type some notes on it, and
go to the fax machine in the next room and fax it, along with the other
documents i've gathered. Make sense? So, all i want to do is create a fax
coversheet

 

[Hollis Paul]

Make sense? So, all i want to do is create a fax
coversheet

Back in the days of Office 98, when I was doing all my posting on
Compuserve, Microsoft provided a Mail and Fax add-in to Office that
allowed me to logon to Compuserve with Outlook. That package later
morphed into Outlook Express. You might check to see if that miserable
program will do what you want.

But, I think your best bet is to create the basic coversheet you want
in Word document, leaving space for the fax number, and what other
stuff you need, open your contact item, copy and paste the number into
the Word doc, then print it. You could put code behind it to extract
the fax number from contact. Doing that gets complicated, but it is
probably better to do it there than from Outlook. The real problem is
that if you do it in VBA for use now, it is down the tubes when
Microsoft removes VBA from Office in a year or two.

 

[Rick A.]

So I guess the answer is NO! That bites, because I have the same idea. What
good is a contact list if you can't use it everywhere? Isn't that the reason
why you chose to stick with one vendor so all of the programs function as one?

 

[Hollis Paul]

What good is a contact list if you can't use it everywhere?

But you can use it everywhere. You just have to start from Word, and
do the necessary code in Word's VBA and save it to a custom template
for Word. Since it is a cover sheet you really want, that really
should be created in word, and if you want to add contact information,
then you can start a mail-merge to fax from Word. The coding to get
the Outlook field data is basically the same, but putting into a field
is a bit more difficult. Still, a resourceful programmer can manage.
You can find many examples of this at
http://www.outlookexchange.com/articles/home/outlookcodeexample.asp

a specific example I wrote is:
http://www.outlookexchange.com/articles/home/outlookcodeexample.asp#60

That code was written for an earlier version of Word, so you will have
to update it to the current object model of Word and Outlook.