Why doesn't a person's Title show up in mail merge?

[CatBlue]

Hello all. I created a postcard in Publisher and then did a mail merge using
my Outlook Contacts. It worked perfectly EXCEPT it ignored the Title field. I
tried different fields; I inserted "Job Title," "Title," and "Courtesy
Title", but the person's title never appeared in the address portion of the
postcard. What am I missing? I hope someone has insight into this and I look
forward to hearing from you. Kind regards, Cat.

 

[Ed Bennett]

Hello all. I created a postcard in Publisher and then did a mail
merge using my Outlook Contacts. It worked perfectly EXCEPT it
ignored the Title field. I tried different fields; I inserted "Job
Title," "Title," and "Courtesy Title", but the person's title never
appeared in the address portion of the postcard.

Does your data source (Outlook Contacts) actually contain data in the Title
field? If not, Publisher will not put anything there when it reads from the
source. It can't guess a title (no one wants to run the risk of referring
to a bloke as a woman or vice-versa).

 

[CatBlue]

Hello All,

Thank you for your quick responses! Alas, I spoke to soon when I said
that everything worked perfectly except the title. As it turns out, I
ran into multiple problems doing a mail merge in Publisher using
Outlook contacts, and it seems that the fields used in one program are
not recognized in another and confusion ensues. The back of my
postcards look crazy! I'll try to give as much detail as I can.

In my Outlook Contacts, the first field is Full Name and so that is
what I enter; Alice B. Henry, or Eric Scott Hoberman, for example.
Publisher does not have a Full Name field; you can only enter First
Name, Middle Initial, and Last Name as your mail merge fields. So with
a name like Alice B. Henry, Publisher put the entire name in the Last
Name field, then put the title CPA in the First Name field. Or, the
middle initial alone ended up in the First Name field. Additionally,
for no reason I could see, Publisher dropped some last names
altogether, even when the person's name was simply first and last (Mark
Ramsay-- on one label, only the first name appeared).

Back to how the fields appear in my Outlook Contacts. Again, the first
field is Full Name, the second is Job Title, then Company, File As,
Phone Numbers, then Addresses. What Publisher recognizes as "Title"
seems to be Mr. and Ms. not Job Title and this is not the same in
Outlook. So the majority of my Job Titles in Outlook -- like CPA and
Attorney At Law -- don't appear at all, and some appear in the wrong
place in mail merge. One of my postcards appeared like this:

CPA's, David Gronsbell & Co
117 East 38th Street
New York, N.Y. 10016-2601

The Job Title in the Mr./Ms space, then the Company name, no first or
last name at all.

I'm at my wits end. I can't figure out if it is just that the fields in
these two programs don't "play well with others" or if it is a mail
merge sorting problem. While in Publisher and using the Mail Merge
Wizard I clicked on the link "Edit recipient list" and this showed me
how the fields would appear on the back of my postcard. It was there
that I saw the missing last names, full names in the Last Name field,
Job Title or Company names in the First Name field -- all sorts of
oddities. I tried to select a particular sort order (sort my last
name), but that didn't have any affect on the way the label appeared.

The only solution I can think of is putting the person's full name, job
title, company and mailing address all in the Addresses field in
Outlook. I believe this would then be the default mailing
address/label:

Eric Scott Hoberman
Attorney At Law
Leitman, Adams & Bailey
One Park Avenue, Suite 1800
New York, NY 10016

Unfortunately, I have over 400 contacts in Outlook and so updating
these contacts would be very time consuming. How do I make this merge
work? I am new to Publisher so I am hoping there is something I am
missing. I look forward to all of your suggestions.

My kindest regards,
Cat

 

[Mary Sauer]

Maybe Word would be a better choice, Word works well with Outlook so I'm told
Getting the job with Office: Sending mail to contacts
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010427871033.aspx

 

[CatBlue]

Hello Mary,

I have read other comments regarding problems with mail merge in
Publisher, but not having the same issues manifest in Word. Since I
have already created the postcard in Publisher, is there some way to
import it into Word? Or do I have to recreate it?

Kind regards,
Cat

 

[Mary Sauer]

I've not used Word for postcards, but there are templates within Word.
In Word, tools, Letters and Mailings, mail merge, the Mail Merge task pane will
open, select labels, in Label options, scroll down to 3263. Step 3 has the
Outlook contacts option.

You probably could copy/paste your information and objects from Publisher to
Word.

 

[CatBlue]

One mystery solved! I went back to Outlook Contacts to see if there was
something wrong on that end. I clicked on the Button "Full Name" and a
separate drop-down menu appeared with the name I'd entered broken down
into components" Title, First, Middle, Last, Suffix. Looking just at
the names that were appearing so oddly in Publisher I found that it was
an Outlook issue. I think when there were commas and a suffix added at
the end of some last names (like writing Alice B. Henry, CPA, LLC)
Outlook Contacts didn't know what to do with that. CPA was put in the
first name category, LLC in the Middle name and then the full name put
in the Last Name field. I made sure the proper names appeared in the
right field and voila, they appeared correctly in Publisher as well.
Huzzah!

Now back to the missing fields. I insert all the fields on the back of
my postcard, but Publisher still doesn't recognize the Middle Name
field or the Job Title field. When I click on the link "Edit recipient
list" I notice that neither Middle Name or Job Title are included as
the fields. What gives? How can I add these?
Thanks again for the help everybody, cheers,
Cat

Cheers,
Cat

 

[CatBlue]

UPDATE: Alas, recreating the postcard in Word does not solve the
problem. The same Mail Merge Wizard appears with the same field issues.
It turns out that I was correct in my first assumption: Mail Merge
doesn't play well with others. It has its own idea of what merge fields
should be named and when they don't match up with your data source
(Outlook Contacts in my case), well, you're out of luck. I found a drop
down menu where you are supposed to be able to assign or "match" your
data source's fields with those of Mail Merge, but all the fields I
wanted to match came up as "unmatched." Huh? Why wouldn't Mail Merge
recognize something so simple and fundamental as a middle name?

So what is one to do? I am flabbergasted that all the programs within
the Microsoft Office Suite don't work in concert with one another.
Again, if someone knows a way to work around this issue, I am all ears.

Take care, kind regards,
Cat

 

[Mary Sauer]

Maybe simply looking at how Outlook does things may help.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/CH790018071033.aspx

 

[Ed Bennett]

It turns out that I was correct in my first assumption: Mail
Merge doesn't play well with others. It has its own idea of what
merge fields should be named and when they don't match up with your
data source (Outlook Contacts in my case), well, you're out of luck.

Actually, that's completely incorrect.

Mail Merge (and every other kind of Merge), opens your data source and looks
at what the fields are named there. If you merge with a database in which
there are three fields named "Foo", "Bar", and "Urgle", when you merge into
Publisher, you will get a list of three available fields with names "Foo",
"Bar", and "Urgle". The issue here is that Outlook doesn't expose its
contact database to the mail merge engine in the same way as it exposes it
to the end user.

 

[CatBlue]

Hello Mary, Ed,

Thank you for your replies. Ed, your reply did confuse me a bit. If
what I see in Outlook is not what is communicated to mail merge, aren't
you saying essentially that the Outlook engine and the mail merge
engine don't speak the same language (hence my term "not playing well
with others)? Again, it's a bit confounding to me that these are all
programs created within the Microsoft Office Suite, and yet they don't
work together seamlessly. To get what you need done you need to know
certain tricks.

Mary, thank you for the link! I finally found the crux of the problem.
If I want certain fields to appear then I have to BEGIN the mail merge
in Outlook. I had been starting it first from Publisher, and then Word
(when I re-created the postcard there). I was finally able to merge the
address labels properly on my postcards (An aside: This took some doing
as well. I kept getting a postcard page with just one address instead
of 4 different ones. More online searches for the answer brought me to
another Google group, microsoft.public.word.mailmerge. I found out that
I had to insert a {Next Record} field in boxes 2-4. However, the
postcard templates came with text boxes for the addresses and text
boxes don't allow the {Next Record} field. I had to delete all the text
boxes and redesign the back of the postcard, but finally success.
Whew!)

But I digress. Since this is the group for discussing Publisher, I do
have a final query. Why was I only able to complete this merge when I
started in Outlook and then chose the postcard created in Word? When I
tried to choose the Publisher document I thought Publisher would open
automatically like it did with the Word document. Instead, I was
brought to a page in Word filled with hieroglyphics. It seems a shame,
because creating and redesigning the postcard in Publisher was much
easier than working in Word, IMO.

My thanks to everyone who replied; I truly appreciated your suggestions
and expertise!

Cheers,
Cat

 

[Mary Sauer]

Publisher handles Outlook contacts differently than Word.
You might get enlightenment from Connie Miller's article.
Answer Box: Use e-mail contacts in Publisher mail merge
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011187801033.aspx

 

[Ed Bennett]

Thank you for your replies. Ed, your reply did confuse me a bit. If
what I see in Outlook is not what is communicated to mail merge,
aren't you saying essentially that the Outlook engine and the mail
merge engine don't speak the same language (hence my term "not
playing well with others)?

No. Publisher's Mail Merge communicates with a standardised data engine in
a standard manner.

I think (although am not an expert on Outlook, so cannot say for sure) this
data engine then communicates with your Outlook files to get at the Contact
database. Outlook has saved this in a proprietary way, and when it is
running, the field names on the screen do not necessarily correspond to
field names in the actual database.

It is confusing, but basically it's Outlook's fault.

Again, it's a bit confounding to me that
these are all programs created within the Microsoft Office Suite, and
yet they don't work together seamlessly. To get what you need done
you need to know certain tricks.

It's a nice ideal, but it's rather impractical. Each program has thousands
of features, and it's a difficult enough task to get them to work how the
majority of users want within the program. To then make them work perfectly
interoperably every other program increases the workload exponentially. In
this case, to make the Outlook Contacts merge work correctly within
Publisher (or another standard database), it may have a negative impact on
the appearance of the Contacts within Outlook itself, or it may just take a
lot of additional development time (which could have productively been spent
on improving other areas of the product which would affect more users).

e.g. Users with Outlook = A very large number
(Users who use Outlook = A slightly smaller, large number)
Users with Publisher = A middle-sized number
(Users who use Publisher = A smaller middle-sized number)
Users with Outlook AND Publisher = A relatively small number
(Users with Outlook AND Publisher who use both = A smaller number)
(Users with Outlook AND Publisher who use Mail Merge = An even smaller
number)
(Users with Outlook AND Publisher who use Mail Merge with their Outlook
contacts = A very small number)

Fixing the Mail Merge from Publisher would affect a very small number of
users. Spending the development time on a global feature would affect a
large number of users.

But I digress. Since this is the group for discussing Publisher, I do
have a final query. Why was I only able to complete this merge when I
started in Outlook and then chose the postcard created in Word? When I
tried to choose the Publisher document I thought Publisher would open
automatically like it did with the Word document. Instead, I was
brought to a page in Word filled with hieroglyphics. It seems a shame,
because creating and redesigning the postcard in Publisher was much
easier than working in Word, IMO.

It is a shame, but this is the way Outlook works.

(Caveat: I've never used Outlook for a mail merge)

It sounds like Outlook is simply invoking Word to open the document in
question. It is specially-programmed to do some jiggery-pokery in Word to
make the document merge correctly. You get heiroglyphics because that is
how Word sees a Publisher file. To do the same with Publisher would require
a lot of work (see the problem described above), probably more than it did
to make it work with Word (due to the different way Publisher works).