Hi Paul,
I've wrestled with this same issue a few dozen times, most recently this morning. The fact that Word provides dialogue boxes to perform an e-mail merge, but then gets all tripped up by Outlook dialogue boxes requiring manual clicks to send each e-mail has always been, and continues to be disappointing. I keep trying again hoping MS has fixed the issue, but find no relief.
For now, I just resign myself to sitting in front of the computer clicking 'allow' a few dozen (or hundred) times, because in the end it's still faster than manually sending every single e-mail.
Mail merge is not that exotic of a feature. It was clearly intended to work in Office by virtue of the dialogues that are there. However the anti-malware protections that have been added have resulted in breaking the intended functionality of the application. How disappointing that nobody at Microsoft has gone to bat to fix this bug, especially after it's been called out in at least a dozen forums I found by different users in a ten-minute search--dating back more than 5 years.
I've found the add-in work-arounds, but like most users, I don't want to get mired in VBA code to perform a function that MS has already written the code to perform.
Those who need mail merge as core functionality have found work-arounds ... custom VBA code or alternate products. It's users like me who only need this occasionally, and are too busy to dig up a work-around, that waste time staring at our screens, clicking "Allow" every 10 seconds. By the time we're done with that, we have too many other things to do to call Microsoft and complain about their laziness for not fixing this stupid bug.
Most people try the mail merge, discover it's broken, and give up. Just because you don't hear from them doesn't mean there isn't demand. We're not talking about a marching-ants text feature, we're talking about e-mail merge. It's useful. Business applications for it abound. It's broken.
Can you please help us get some traction so someone at Microsoft will recognize and fix this annoying, disappointing bug?
Thanks,
Joe
Quote:
Originally Posted by macropod
Hi Martin,
I frequesntly see people expressing disappointment, and sometimes even anger, that Word doesn't provide a built-in means to do something that few people seem to have a need for.
I'm sure Word's feature list is mostly driven by demand (and some of the perceived need may be only that - perceived), plus features that MS designers think would be 'neat', even if there's little use for them (eg marching-ants text). I think the fact no-one's even developed an add-in to automate the process you're trying to achieve is an indication of how little demand there is for it.
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