Mail Merge Help!

@Amy Horrocks
BB and MS never had a break up. If anything, it is working more together.

The “break up” you are speaking of is Blackbaud disabling the ability to open ANY application on the hosted environment. This is to enhance Blackbaud hosting security (in a sense). Since no application can be “open” other than RE FE and file explorer, you cannot do mail merge directly in RE when it requires RE to “open” MS Word.

So first question is, is your current org's RE hosted by Blackbaud or self-hosted?

@Amy Horrocks Are you opening them on your local version of Word? If you can access them from your local computer and not through Citrix, you shouldn't have any issue editing them.

@Amy Horrocks I think you'll need to go through the many threads about how this process changed. It's been many years since then and I can't remember how we used to do it. But your current organization had to have come up with a way of doing letters before? Is there a new documented process that you can use, because like you stated these changes happened over 2 years ago.

I think you'll find a number of threads on it, but many people have adopted a bunch of new ways to do these mail merges. Most of them are going to be exporting and performing conditional mail merges in Word themselves or automation. I would start with this thread here.

@Amy Horrocks
Don't assume, that is something you will need to know if you want to better handle your database.

How are you accessing RE? this will give light to how your RE is hosted.

@Amy Horrocks
This means you are likely self-hosted. Check with your IT staff.

This also means the error you are receiving when trying to conditional merge will require your IT team to investigate as well. If you got error message, you can post it here and someone maybe able to help, but this is more on your IT team to investigate the error

@Amy Horrocks
It is not definitive that it is something internal. However, you should definitely talk to your IT team first.

As the same time, you can post the error screenshot and message and see if others here may have hit the same issue (those that are also self hosting) that may be able to help.

@Amy Horrocks
if you simply want to “clean up” the selection list, then making the letter code inactive is best way to go.

I do not know for sure if deleting will affect previously merged one using the deleted code/doc. Maybe ask BB Support will have a more straightforward answer.