Mail Merge with Access Data Source (Office 2000 SR1)

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Hi

I am trying to run a mail merge with the data source an Access table. When I go to set the query options I want output for all the records that have yes in a particular field (it is a YES/NO) When I try to set the query options from the mail merge in Word I get a message that says “Word could not parse your query options into a valid SQL string” Should I have run the query in Access and based the mail merge on the query instead?

Hopefully

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Probably easier that way…

But!
Try using -1 for Yes criteria, 0 for No
Yes/No fields create a value equal to these.

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Dreamboat is correct in that a query in Access is easier (assuming you have a reasonable degree of comfort with doing queries in Access), and it is also more efficient. If you use the table, Access passes the entire set of records to Word, and Word has to filter the correct records out. Doing it in Access, Word only sees the set of data that it needs. As an example, we do a mail merge in word to a subset of about 80,000 records, but only about 25,000 actually get the document (actually an email). In that case it is much quicker to return the subset of data to Word, rather than the whole thing. In addition, Access capabilites with SQL statements are considerably more robust than the options you get in Word. Hope this makes sense!

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Thanks to you both. It was one of those end of day things where I had a nagging feeling that I wasn’t tackling things in the most efficient way but couldn’t take time to stop and think about it before I got it out of the way. Word talking to me about SQL is guaranteed to cause panic!
Regards

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