Mail Merge Word 2007 to 2003

  • Thread starter Thread starter Anthony
  • Start date Start date
A

Anthony

I currently use my personal laptop at work. The issue we have run into is
that I have Office 2007 and work has Office 2003. I created a Word document
and have been saving the Word Document as a 97-03 or whatever file.

The thing is that when I email the mail merge forms (the .doc and .mdb)
files to work computers, the mdb file will not load in Word. I think it may
have to do with the fact that the mdb file is 07 oriented and 03 Word doesn't
know what to do with it...

any suggestions?
 
If it's actually a .mdb it is 2003 oriented - Access 2007 uses a different
OOXML extension altogether (.accdb). It sounds more like the systems "at
work" don't have Access or a suitable alternative. Word can't open the data
file - it relies on the availability of the associated application to run in
the background (unless the data is in a Word or text format).

Use Access to export the table/query as a text file... Or better yet, do the
merge yourself as a new Word file saved as a .doc & send them the finished
product. You can actually d the merge from within Word or from Access.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac
 
The mdb format used by mail merge is a bit of a curiosity. If created by
Word 2007, it appears to need Access 2007 on the PC in order to re-open it,
though it is not a true Access 2007 file; however there is a workaround. In
Office 2007 add the old Mailmerge helper to the QAT
http://www.gmayor.com/merge_labels_with_word_2007.htm. Use this to edit the
data source attached to your merge document. This entails breaking the link.
When prompted save the data file as a Word 97-2003 document. The resulting
document is a Word table that you can use in place of the mdb data source
and will work with both Word versions.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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I greatly prefer to create all my data sources directly as either Word
tables or Excel sheets. I don't think I've ever actually used one of the
..mdb data sources used by Word 2002 and above.
 
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