With worlarounds, "easiest" is typically the one you managed to do, since it
works and you understood how to do it :-)

How were you trying to connect tot he data - starting with Outlook or with
Word? Is the necessary contacts folder definitely marked as being in the
Outlook Address Book?

However, assuming that the problem is that you can no longer use select
contacts in Outlook and use Outlook Tools|"Mail Merge..." to do the merge,
another possibility may be to use Access instead of Excel to get the data.
It's only simple if the user has Access on their system (although I thing
the same thing can be acheived using VBA), but what you do is:
a. create a blank Access database
b. click File|"Get External Data"|"Link Tables"
c. in the Files of Type dropdown at the bottom of the Link dialog box,
select Outlook(). Eventually you should see a list of contact lists, address
folders and so on. Select the one you want.
d. follow the dialog through and you should end up with a linked table in
Access - let's say the table is called mycontacts1
e. Use that as the data source for the merge. If that does not work, create
a query in Access called contacts1 that simply gets all the rows and columns
from mycontacts1 (in SQL, it's something like SELECT * FROM [mycontacts1]

I don't know if this will work in the scenario you describe but if it does,
the advantage over the Excel solution is that you don't need to do any
exporting - when you use the Access table/query, you should always get the
up-to-date data automatically.

One more thing: when you get data from Outlook this way, the fields and
field names will probably be different from the ones that you used if/when
you initiated the merge from Outlook's Tools|Mail Merge facility.

Peter Jamieson