Mail Merge

Liz Whittington

When merging donor acknowledgement letters, I get the following Microsoft Office command prompt:



       Select From Mail Data - Data from your databasee will be placed in this document. Do you wish to continue?



I understand the reason for the prompt and know Microsoft has a workaround. Before we look into going this route, I want to find out what other organizations are doing. Has anyone found a different workaround? We use conditional mail merge and have many letter templates so this is quite a time consuming issue for us.

 

JoAnn Strommen

Liz,

I get similar message when I'm merging Word and Excel.  I have never gotten a message like that within RE.  Do you mean when you merge them using Mail function or are you taking data outside of RE and then merging?   I don't use conditional merges very often but pretty sure I haven't gotten the need for the prompt even then in RE.  (Maybe my memory is poor.)



 

Aldera Chisholm

I get this every time... If I have a letter with 5 different conditional fields, the message will pop up five times, so yes, it is terribly annoying. I now just have the habit of while RE is spinning I hit Alt-Tab to bring me to the Word screen, click yes yes yes somewhat obsessively and then going in.



My IT guys tell me it's a feature of the some versions of Office, because it's pulling data from an exterior source, it thinks it's unsecure data. The work-around MS provides isn't acceptable for them, so we have to live with it.



Here is the Microsoft page on it for more info:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/825765

Vanessa Taylor

We have the same issue, including not being able to use the workaround due to IT restrictions. It's annoying and devilishly difficult to explain when I'm trying to write procedures for end users. We're just living with it, which is acceptable as we don't use all that many different letters right now, but I do wish there was a way to avoid it and will be watching this post!

Liz Whittington

JoAnn, I get the messge when running a conditional mail merge in RE using Mail function.



I, too, think we will have to live with it, but I thought it was worth asking in case someone out there had a better idea. I will be sure to share if I learn of any better solutions.

Marie Stark

Liz,

We also had this problem for a while.We would get at least 10 prompts for each mail merge.

 The fix is in the Microsoft article that you mentioned.   A registry setting has to be added.

We had our IT type fix the registry setting for each user, and also on our server.

We no longer get the prompts.

Liz Whittington

Marie, have you experienced any problems since implementing the Microsoft solution?

Marie Stark

Hi Liz,

No, we haven't experienced any more problems. I would say that the process is still slow. I think that the same messages are still running in the background somehow, but we just don't see the prompts.

Nicole S

I have had everyone use the Microsoft workaround with no problems at all. 

Aldera Chisholm

Update on this: we have found that the most recent version of Word isn't causing this issue for us. Only some of our org's computers are updated, so I was able to test it on both versions.

Liz Whittington

Thank you for the update, Aldera. That is very good to know.