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Problem With Mail Merge Fields

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Hello All,

I am running Windows XP/SP2 which has the Microsoft Office Suite 2003. I designed a postcard in Publisher 2003 and then attempted to do a mail merge using Outlook Contacts. However, despite inserting the fields for Middle Name, Suffix and Job Title, these items do not show up on the merged postcard. For example, here is how I would like the postcard to appear:

Jack D. March, Esq
Attorney At Law
March, Middle & Bailey
1 Park Avenue
NY, NY 10016

Instead, what I get is this:

Jack March
March, Middle & Bailey
1 Park Avenue
NY, NY 10016

After searching the Help Files I found out that the fields in my data source are not always the called by the same name in Mail Merge. I'm supposed to be able to "match" up the fields using the Mail Merge drop-down menu, but to my dismay I found that some fields in Mail Merge are "unmatched." I take this to mean that even though Outlook Contacts offers such fields as Job Title, Mail Merge won't recognize it?

I got some feedback from a microsoft group on google and they suggested trying to make the postcard in Word. Unfortunately, the Mail Merge Wizard that appears in Word is exactly the same, with the same field issues, so it doesn't seem to matter where the card is designed.

I assumed Microsoft Office programs would work in concert with each other, but not so much. Does anyone know of a way around this problem so I can complete the merge?

I look forward to your replies, kind regards,
Cat

2 replies

by rkuhn040172

Export your Outlook contacts to a .csv or Excel or similar.

The first row will be the header records and will tell you their names.

Do the match manually from there.

by obans_rover

Crazy as it seems, Job Title doesn't appear as an exported field from Outlook 2003 to Word 2003. Why would Word take some fields and not others. Seems like mindless shortsightedness for some coder to decide what to send and NOT send. Very frustrating to go throught the merge exercise and find fields missing. Any workaround?

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