Mail Merge Word 2007 to 2003

[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?

 

[CyberTaz]

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

 

[Graham Mayor]

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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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

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.