faulty table of contents after mail merge

[Guest]

I use mail merge to populate many forms and documents which also have Table
of Contents. After completing the mail merge the TOC no longer works--if you
F9 the page #'s come up as "error - bookmark not defined." My only solution
so far has been to delete the TOC and do it again. Is there a way around
this?

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?RGlhbmEgTW9ycmlzb24=?=,

I use mail merge to populate many forms and documents which also have Table
of Contents. After completing the mail merge the TOC no longer works--if you
F9 the page #'s come up as "error - bookmark not defined." My only solution
so far has been to delete the TOC and do it again. Is there a way around
this?

No, there's not. The problem is that creating a TOC places hidden bookmarks in
the document. When the TOC updates, it searches for these bookmarks (names
beginning with _toc) and builds the TOC. Bookmark names, however, MUST be unique
a document. Since mail merge effectively DUPLICATES all the static text in a
document, the bookmarks are (logically) lost during the merge process. That's
what you have to create a TOC after the mail merge.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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