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Old 04-04-2013, 01:49 PM
richard creer richard creer is offline Straight to Merge and Finish Windows 7 32bit Straight to Merge and Finish Office 2007
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I have a form letter all set up to merge with a csv file. It works fine.



Now I want to replace the csv with a new file with identical name, path and format, just different data.

I think I should just be able to open the doc and go straight to Merge and Finish but M&F is disabled. Surely I don't have to go through the wizard all over again.

Word 2007

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Old 04-04-2013, 04:40 PM
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Hi Richard,

You shouldn't need to re-connect in that scenario. What you describe suggests you maybe didn't save the mailmerge main document after making the original connection.
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Old 04-05-2013, 11:58 AM
richard creer richard creer is offline Straight to Merge and Finish Windows 7 32bit Straight to Merge and Finish Office 2007
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Nope. I saved the merge document. When I open it again everything on the Mailings tab to the right of Select Recipients is disabled. When I go through the process of Selecting recipients, ie. pointing the mergedoc at the same date source, then everything, including Finish & Merge, is enabled. My merge fields are all there (proving IMHO that I did save it) and everything works just fine.

I must be doing something wrong because surely users shouldn't be expected to pointlessly reconnect to the data source every time. But what can it be that am I doing wrong?
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Old 04-05-2013, 01:36 PM
richard creer richard creer is offline Straight to Merge and Finish Windows 7 32bit Straight to Merge and Finish Office 2007
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Cracked it, sort of. The bit I hadn't mention, because I thought it didn't matter, was that the data source is being downloaded from the web. This means that the file arrives "blocked". Going into its properties each time and unblocking it allows it to be used as expected.

So we have a solution but it is entirely unsatisfactory. I can probably train my users to do a Save As when they download so that they don't get multiple versions of the data source named ..(1).csv, ..(2).csv etc. They will probably reluctantly accept the need to not have a merge doc open when they download (the download fails) and reply Yes to "Opening this document will run the following SQL command" (meaningless to the average user) but having to find the file, right click, choose properties, hit Unblock - no, that's going to be just too much trouble.

Taking a step back - all I want to do is show a person's record on a website, have a button to click that creates and downloads a csv file of contact details, and have some pre-defined letters as merge docs for the user to open and merge to printer. Not so difficult you would have thought but, unless someone has a better idea, too beset with technical obstacles to be workable.
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Old 04-05-2013, 03:38 PM
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Hi Richard,

It is possible probably to automate the unblocking & merge process via a macro, but unless the data file is saved with the same path & filename, the process will fall over. It is also possible to use a macro to pull data directly from a web page, but that may be a bridge too far. Ultimately, the question is one of where and how much do you move the complexity from the user to the programmer. I'm all for making things as simple for the user as practicable, hiding the complexity in the code, but that means you may be creating an on-going maintenance task for the programmer (eg websites change, file names & locations change, someone upgrades the OS/network and that impinges on things, etc).
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Old 04-06-2013, 05:07 AM
richard creer richard creer is offline Straight to Merge and Finish Windows 7 32bit Straight to Merge and Finish Office 2007
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If you, or more precisely the user, makes the web site Trusted then downloaded files are not blocked. So this is better albeit the process is, from a user's perspective, still too complicated.

In my (long) experience of developing applications for average office workers it is essential to make everything as simple as possible otherwise they will find an alternative, and less good, way. It's the programmer's job to provide that simplicity though of course it would help if the major software vendors made the programmers life easier.

As it is I see myself having to write a little program for the user to run that finds the latest version of the downloaded data source, creates a new copy of it to unblock it, renames it, shows the user a list of merge docs and, when a doc is chosen, opens it and does a merge to new document. As you say there may well be on-going maintenance (due IMHO in no small part to the inability of major software vendors to maintain compatibility) but that's what maintenance contracts are for.
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