Why does Word rearrance my columns in Excel in a mail merge?

S

SharronTucker

I am doing a mail merge using an Excel spreadsheet and the columns are in
order by name, address, city, state, zip. When I get the selection box in
the mailmerge, my columns have been re-arranged to address, city, state, zip,
name and I have to scroll to the last column (name, which is really first in
my Excel spreadsheet) to see if I want to sent to that person. Then I have
to scroll back to the checkbox to uncheck if I do not want to send to that
person.

This has happened several times with different people in our organization
and different spreadsheet. They have not filtered or sorted the spreadsheet,
Word just scrambles the order of the columns.
 
C

Cindy Meister

Hi Sharron

the Mail merge group would have been the more appropriate place for this.
And you'd have probably gotten an answer before now...

There is no way to change the order in which Word displays these columns in
the Recipient dialog box. Someone in the Dev team apparently thought it would
be "cool" to pre-sort for the user. Seeing what else they did to the
interface, they obviously have no idea how mail merge is USED <sigh>

You can, however, drag the columns in the dialog box to change the order for
that particular mail merge session. The change won't "stick", but at least
you won't have to go back and forth for each and every entry...

The only other thing I can suggest would be to try changing the column from
"Name" to "Last Name" and see if Word sorts it to the front.

-- Cindy
 
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