There's no alternative to using merge if merge is what you are doing. You
will either have to put up with the SQL message or suppress it via the
registry hack.
If you want to manually type labels, simply create a new document from the
envelope/label tool.

Yes, it's pretty annoying.

<<

Well, it may still make the difference. The KB article is a bit ambiguous
and does nto cover all the different ways in which a data source might be
opened. in essence, it talks about "opening a Word document that has a data
source attached" (either manually or using automation) and "A mail merge
main document that is opened by using Microsoft Visual Basic for
Applications(VBA) does not have the data source attached.", i.e. the
situation where you use automation to open a Word document and then use VBA
to attach a data source (I think!) - in this case, if you don't set up that
registry entry, Word will fail the OpenDataSource and the best you can do is
trap the error.

But you /may/ be OK if you
a. save the document with no data source attached
b. open the data source using Word VBA, e.g. in an autoopen macro in your
document.

When you do (a), what you lose is the data source and any sort/filter
settings. Precisely what you need to do depends on the data source but for a
file type such as a Word document or delimited text file it may be enough to
use

Sub autoopen()
ActiveDocument.MailMerge.OpenDataSource _
 Name:="C:\mypath\myds.doc"
End Sub

FWIW, you get the "SQL" message even with simple data sources such as plain
text files and Word files because Word does actually issue SQL for all types
of data source. In the case of data sources that Word reads using a file
converter (such as Word documents, and some text files), it uses a very
simple dialect of SQL implemented within Word. However, by default, Word
2002/3 will try to open some delimited text files using the Access/Jet OLE
DB provider (ACE OLE DB provider in Office 2007) which implmenets the full
Jet SQL dialect.

So, if you need to recover sort/filter options, you need to construct and
issue the correct SQL. You can usually discover what that is by looking at
ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.QueryString
while the data source is attached. You can put it in the OpenDataSource via,
something like

Sub autoopen()
ActiveDocument.MailMerge.OpenDataSource _
 Name:="C:\mypath\myds.doc", _
 SQLStatement:="SELECT * FROM C:\mypath\myds.doc WHERE (myfield = 'A')"
End Sub

I can't guarantee that it will work - it seems a bit arbitrary to me - but
probably worth a try.

There is another approach that relies on a trick where you save your mail
merge main document as a .rtf file, then manually remove the SQL statement.
For more on that, see the discussion at

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields/browse_f
rm/thread/e6ce577bfc15bdf8/c5be83d2b1593016?tvc=1&q=peter+jamieson+merge+sql+rtf
#c5be83d2b1593016

(you may need to paste that URL back together).

AFAICR it can only be made to work with certain types of data source, and is
vulnerable to further security-related changes made by Microsoft.

The other alternative is to write VBA that grabs the data using whatever
method is appropriate (e.g. reading traditional text files, automation, ADO)
and stuffs it directly into the table cells of your label layout.

Peter Jamieson