Hi.

I'm working on a project for work and its completely stumping me. I don't often have to mail merge and up until recently, they've all been pretty straight forward jobs - creating the address and greeting line for printed letters.

However, my manager loves flavour of the month type stuff and he's just hired a new marketing manager who is big on ideas but her computing skills don't match most 10 year old's.



Anyway, I've sorted the merge for her, but it requires a dynamic URL. The merge generates it fine. But there's the annoying part of word where you have to show ALT+F9 to show the field code, select all, refresh with F9, then ALT+F9 again to go back to the actual display text.

Now, if I were running this, it wouldn't be a problem, but this new marketing manager will actually be handling it, and she's a woman who considers putting &Name-First=Joe on the end of a URL to be advanced coding and can't even do a print screen and paste it into paint. I've had to show her six times just how to do the basic mail merge to generate "Mr Joe Blogs" from a CSV (took me 4 just to teach her how to save a CSV).

So obviously I have to make it completely idiot proof (I'm working to the threshold "is this on the level of an 8 year old?"). She will forget to refresh the codes before sending and when she does, we'll be in a LOT of hot water in regards to the Data Protection Act because we'd just have given 50-60 customers a fair amount of sensitive information about whatever customer is record 1.

So is there a way to bypass the need to do the F9 refresh whenever the merge is done? Just select the source and hit merge? Or am I just hoping in vain?

Thanks in advance