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

It's not at al clear why you're using CSV files for the mailmerge, when the data are already in some other application (Excel?) that can most likely be used as the data source.

As for the URLs, unless you've gone to the extra steps to insert them as clickable links (see the 'Mailmerge TIPS' Sticky thread at the forum top), there shouldn't be any fields in the output to update. Are you sure the merge is being executed, rather than just previewed?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

CSV because that's what our CRM database outputs. Its not actually a great system, mainly because no one who actually uses it regularly was involved in choosing it. We were going to get the upgraded version of our old system, but then one of the owners golf buddies recommended it, so it became the be-all-and-end-all (its actually a horrible system designed for a rental style business like car rentals rather than a stock sales based business with a load of mediocre stuff tacked onto the side of it, half of which is actually no use. I spend half my life making data analysis spreadsheets because it can't do it, but its all we've got to work with).

And again, because of the boss, it does have to be a clickable link. He's pretty OCD so the idea of having something like

https://www.ABCD.com/stuff/?f=123456...&salesman=Fred

in the email as text rather than a link saying "click here" would be unthinkable. He can't even tolerate us having a spare monitor, tower and cables in a cupboard in the back of the stores room so that we have a fall back if something breaks. The idea of something going to customers which wasn't all pristine and perfect would be criminal. And he's no more computer literate than his new marketing manager, in his eyes anything is doable, everything is straightforward and nothing will take longer than half an hour to do. If it does, its not down to the complexity of the system or an inherent limitation of the system, or even "Its processing 110,000 records of 50 columns to produce 70 different stats so its gonna take a little while to process". If its not done the way he wants in the time scale he wants, you're clearly not doing it right.

OK, but a mailmerge should still be able to retrieve the data it requires from the database without the need for the CSV.

So are these links in the body of the email, or in documents being sent as attachments? If the former, are the emails being sent as plain text, or in HTML format?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

You'd think so but no. Its a nonsense system picked by the owner who doesn't know what the system actually needs (he literally didn't log into it for the first year of use). The server is stored off site and we can only access it through what is basically a web interface. I know that in practical terms its basically just a spreadsheet with a fancy UI, but all I can get is that UI and when you ring them up to say "how can we access it?" the answer is "no one's ever asked that before. Why would you need to access it? You have reports for that."

Like I say, its a system designed for a company doing short term car rentals which has had stuff added on to make it work for a car sales dealership, but not very well. There are literally dozens of things which we would want which we're having to use bad work around's for (ie - we associate a customer to a salesman because for salesmen being paid on commission, having their customer sent to another salesman would be a huge issue, they nearly close a deal, the customer comes in, gets sent to another salesman and they get the sale and the commission. But because the system is designed for rental, where sales are sales and who makes them doesn't matter, you can't do that, so we're having to use the intro-source section to associate salesman to customer). And because its not bespoke, its the same interface for every company using that system, we can't get it changed just for us. Like I say, its a bad choice but its all I've got to work with.

The links are in the body of HTML format emails.

Basically it'd be along the lines of:

Dear Mr Blogs,

In relation to your recent purchase, we would like to ask you to fill out a short feedback form.

Please click here for the survey.

Thank You



We can get the text right, and it does generate a link, but every link comes out based on the the same record, rather than bespoke as we wanted.

Apologies for the delay in replying, but I've just spent a couple of days rebuilding my system and, as I don't normally use Outlook, I had to set that up as well for testing.

I've just completing testing using the 'Mailmerge Hyperlink ‘Click Here’ Insertion' process outlined here: https://www.msofficeforums.com/mail-...ps-tricks.html and found that the hyperlinks inserted into the HTML emails all point to the correct addresses (i.e. a different address for each record). Therefore, you should be able to do the same.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]