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MS Office Forum / Publisher / General MS Publisher Questions / April 2006Why doesn't a person's Title show up in mail merge?
Hello all. I created a postcard in Publisher and then did a mail merge using my Outlook Contacts. It worked perfectly EXCEPT it ignored the Title field. I tried different fields; I inserted "Job Title," "Title," and "Courtesy Title", but the person's title never appeared in the address portion of the postcard. What am I missing? I hope someone has insight into this and I look forward to hearing from you. Kind regards, Cat. I don't use the Mail Merge function so my suggestion may be a bit off. Did you add the Field Code for the Title in the Mail Merge? In the Help it looks like this <<Title>><<First Name>><<Last Name>> <<Address Line>>  SignatureDon Vancouver USA > Hello all. I created a postcard in Publisher and then did a mail merge > using [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > look > forward to hearing from you. Kind regards, Cat. > Hello all. I created a postcard in Publisher and then did a mail > merge using my Outlook Contacts. It worked perfectly EXCEPT it > ignored the Title field. I tried different fields; I inserted "Job > Title," "Title," and "Courtesy Title", but the person's title never > appeared in the address portion of the postcard. Does your data source (Outlook Contacts) actually contain data in the Title field? If not, Publisher will not put anything there when it reads from the source. It can't guess a title (no one wants to run the risk of referring to a bloke as a woman or vice-versa). SignatureEd Bennett - MVP Microsoft Publisher Hello All, Thank you for your quick responses! Alas, I spoke to soon when I said that everything worked perfectly except the title. As it turns out, I ran into multiple problems doing a mail merge in Publisher using Outlook contacts, and it seems that the fields used in one program are not recognized in another and confusion ensues. The back of my postcards look crazy! I'll try to give as much detail as I can. In my Outlook Contacts, the first field is Full Name and so that is what I enter; Alice B. Henry, or Eric Scott Hoberman, for example. Publisher does not have a Full Name field; you can only enter First Name, Middle Initial, and Last Name as your mail merge fields. So with a name like Alice B. Henry, Publisher put the entire name in the Last Name field, then put the title CPA in the First Name field. Or, the middle initial alone ended up in the First Name field. Additionally, for no reason I could see, Publisher dropped some last names altogether, even when the person's name was simply first and last (Mark Ramsay-- on one label, only the first name appeared). Back to how the fields appear in my Outlook Contacts. Again, the first field is Full Name, the second is Job Title, then Company, File As, Phone Numbers, then Addresses. What Publisher recognizes as "Title" seems to be Mr. and Ms. not Job Title and this is not the same in Outlook. So the majority of my Job Titles in Outlook -- like CPA and Attorney At Law -- don't appear at all, and some appear in the wrong place in mail merge. One of my postcards appeared like this: CPA's, David Gronsbell & Co 117 East 38th Street New York, N.Y. 10016-2601 The Job Title in the Mr./Ms space, then the Company name, no first or last name at all. I'm at my wits end. I can't figure out if it is just that the fields in these two programs don't "play well with others" or if it is a mail merge sorting problem. While in Publisher and using the Mail Merge Wizard I clicked on the link "Edit recipient list" and this showed me how the fields would appear on the back of my postcard. It was there that I saw the missing last names, full names in the Last Name field, Job Title or Company names in the First Name field -- all sorts of oddities. I tried to select a particular sort order (sort my last name), but that didn't have any affect on the way the label appeared. The only solution I can think of is putting the person's full name, job title, company and mailing address all in the Addresses field in Outlook. I believe this would then be the default mailing address/label: Eric Scott Hoberman Attorney At Law Leitman, Adams & Bailey One Park Avenue, Suite 1800 New York, NY 10016 Unfortunately, I have over 400 contacts in Outlook and so updating these contacts would be very time consuming. How do I make this merge work? I am new to Publisher so I am hoping there is something I am missing. I look forward to all of your suggestions. My kindest regards, Cat Maybe Word would be a better choice, Word works well with Outlook so I'm told Getting the job with Office: Sending mail to contacts http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010427871033.aspx SignatureMary Sauer MSFT MVP http://office.microsoft.com/ http://msauer.mvps.org/ news://msnews.microsoft.com > Hello All, > [quoted text clipped - 59 lines] > My kindest regards, > Cat Hello Mary, I have read other comments regarding problems with mail merge in Publisher, but not having the same issues manifest in Word. Since I have already created the postcard in Publisher, is there some way to import it into Word? Or do I have to recreate it? Kind regards, Cat I've not used Word for postcards, but there are templates within Word. In Word, tools, Letters and Mailings, mail merge, the Mail Merge task pane will open, select labels, in Label options, scroll down to 3263. Step 3 has the Outlook contacts option. You probably could copy/paste your information and objects from Publisher to Word. SignatureMary Sauer MSFT MVP http://office.microsoft.com/ http://msauer.mvps.org/ news://msnews.microsoft.com > Hello Mary, > [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > Kind regards, > Cat One mystery solved! I went back to Outlook Contacts to see if there was something wrong on that end. I clicked on the Button "Full Name" and a separate drop-down menu appeared with the name I'd entered broken down into components" Title, First, Middle, Last, Suffix. Looking just at the names that were appearing so oddly in Publisher I found that it was an Outlook issue. I think when there were commas and a suffix added at the end of some last names (like writing Alice B. Henry, CPA, LLC) Outlook Contacts didn't know what to do with that. CPA was put in the first name category, LLC in the Middle name and then the full name put in the Last Name field. I made sure the proper names appeared in the right field and voila, they appeared correctly in Publisher as well. Huzzah! Now back to the missing fields. I insert all the fields on the back of my postcard, but Publisher still doesn't recognize the Middle Name field or the Job Title field. When I click on the link "Edit recipient list" I notice that neither Middle Name or Job Title are included as the fields. What gives? How can I add these? Thanks again for the help everybody, cheers, Cat Cheers, Cat UPDATE: Alas, recreating the postcard in Word does not solve the problem. The same Mail Merge Wizard appears with the same field issues. It turns out that I was correct in my first assumption: Mail Merge doesn't play well with others. It has its own idea of what merge fields should be named and when they don't match up with your data source (Outlook Contacts in my case), well, you're out of luck. I found a drop down menu where you are supposed to be able to assign or "match" your data source's fields with those of Mail Merge, but all the fields I wanted to match came up as "unmatched." Huh? Why wouldn't Mail Merge recognize something so simple and fundamental as a middle name? So what is one to do? I am flabbergasted that all the programs within the Microsoft Office Suite don't work in concert with one another. Again, if someone knows a way to work around this issue, I am all ears. Take care, kind regards, Cat Maybe simply looking at how Outlook does things may help. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/CH790018071033.aspx SignatureMary Sauer MSFT MVP http://office.microsoft.com/ http://msauer.mvps.org/ news://msnews.microsoft.com > UPDATE: Alas, recreating the postcard in Word does not solve the > problem. The same Mail Merge Wizard appears with the same field issues. [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > Take care, kind regards, > Cat CatBlue <joyrosem@gmail.com> was very recently heard to utter: > It turns out that I was correct in my first assumption: Mail > Merge doesn't play well with others. It has its own idea of what > merge fields should be named and when they don't match up with your > data source (Outlook Contacts in my case), well, you're out of luck. Actually, that's completely incorrect. Mail Merge (and every other kind of Merge), opens your data source and looks at what the fields are named there. If you merge with a database in which there are three fields named "Foo", "Bar", and "Urgle", when you merge into Publisher, you will get a list of three available fields with names "Foo", "Bar", and "Urgle". The issue here is that Outlook doesn't expose its contact database to the mail merge engine in the same way as it exposes it to the end user. SignatureEd Bennett - MVP Microsoft Publisher Hello Mary, Ed, Thank you for your replies. Ed, your reply did confuse me a bit. If what I see in Outlook is not what is communicated to mail merge, aren't you saying essentially that the Outlook engine and the mail merge engine don't speak the same language (hence my term "not playing well with others)? Again, it's a bit confounding to me that these are all programs created within the Microsoft Office Suite, and yet they don't work together seamlessly. To get what you need done you need to know certain tricks. Mary, thank you for the link! I finally found the crux of the problem. If I want certain fields to appear then I have to BEGIN the mail merge in Outlook. I had been starting it first from Publisher, and then Word (when I re-created the postcard there). I was finally able to merge the address labels properly on my postcards (An aside: This took some doing as well. I kept getting a postcard page with just one address instead of 4 different ones. More online searches for the answer brought me to another Google group, microsoft.public.word.mailmerge. I found out that I had to insert a {Next Record} field in boxes 2-4. However, the postcard templates came with text boxes for the addresses and text boxes don't allow the {Next Record} field. I had to delete all the text boxes and redesign the back of the postcard, but finally success. Whew!) But I digress. Since this is the group for discussing Publisher, I do have a final query. Why was I only able to complete this merge when I started in Outlook and then chose the postcard created in Word? When I tried to choose the Publisher document I thought Publisher would open automatically like it did with the Word document. Instead, I was brought to a page in Word filled with hieroglyphics. It seems a shame, because creating and redesigning the postcard in Publisher was much easier than working in Word, IMO. My thanks to everyone who replied; I truly appreciated your suggestions and expertise! Cheers, Cat Publisher handles Outlook contacts differently than Word. You might get enlightenment from Connie Miller's article. Answer Box: Use e-mail contacts in Publisher mail merge http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011187801033.aspx SignatureMary Sauer MSFT MVP http://office.microsoft.com/ http://msauer.mvps.org/ news://msnews.microsoft.com > Hello Mary, Ed, > [quoted text clipped - 35 lines] > Cheers, > Cat CatBlue <joyrosem@gmail.com> was very recently heard to utter: > Thank you for your replies. Ed, your reply did confuse me a bit. If > what I see in Outlook is not what is communicated to mail merge, > aren't you saying essentially that the Outlook engine and the mail > merge engine don't speak the same language (hence my term "not > playing well with others)? No. Publisher's Mail Merge communicates with a standardised data engine in a standard manner. I think (although am not an expert on Outlook, so cannot say for sure) this data engine then communicates with your Outlook files to get at the Contact database. Outlook has saved this in a proprietary way, and when it is running, the field names on the screen do not necessarily correspond to field names in the actual database. It is confusing, but basically it's Outlook's fault. > Again, it's a bit confounding to me that > these are all programs created within the Microsoft Office Suite, and > yet they don't work together seamlessly. To get what you need done > you need to know certain tricks. It's a nice ideal, but it's rather impractical. Each program has thousands of features, and it's a difficult enough task to get them to work how the majority of users want within the program. To then make them work perfectly interoperably every other program increases the workload exponentially. In this case, to make the Outlook Contacts merge work correctly within Publisher (or another standard database), it may have a negative impact on the appearance of the Contacts within Outlook itself, or it may just take a lot of additional development time (which could have productively been spent on improving other areas of the product which would affect more users). e.g. Users with Outlook = A very large number (Users who use Outlook = A slightly smaller, large number) Users with Publisher = A middle-sized number (Users who use Publisher = A smaller middle-sized number) Users with Outlook AND Publisher = A relatively small number (Users with Outlook AND Publisher who use both = A smaller number) (Users with Outlook AND Publisher who use Mail Merge = An even smaller number) (Users with Outlook AND Publisher who use Mail Merge with their Outlook contacts = A very small number) Fixing the Mail Merge from Publisher would affect a very small number of users. Spending the development time on a global feature would affect a large number of users. > But I digress. Since this is the group for discussing Publisher, I do > have a final query. Why was I only able to complete this merge when I [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > because creating and redesigning the postcard in Publisher was much > easier than working in Word, IMO. It is a shame, but this is the way Outlook works. (Caveat: I've never used Outlook for a mail merge) It sounds like Outlook is simply invoking Word to open the document in question. It is specially-programmed to do some jiggery-pokery in Word to make the document merge correctly. You get heiroglyphics because that is how Word sees a Publisher file. To do the same with Publisher would require a lot of work (see the problem described above), probably more than it did to make it work with Word (due to the different way Publisher works). SignatureEd Bennett - MVP Microsoft Publisher |
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