Outlook2000 mail merge plugin or utility

[Guest]

I'm running Outlook2000 on top of NT4.0 and I want to do mail merge to
Outlook from any or all of: Access, Word, Excel. I see some utilities for
sale, but I don't know if they're any good or if MS has one?

 

[DL]

Its a while since I used OL2K for a mail merge, with Word, you've checked OL
help? I seem to recollect thats where I started

 

[Guest]

Hi, DL:

According to the Outlook Help, my version as-is only supports mail merge
with Outlook contacts. I want to use a Word, Access or Excel datalist to
merge INTO Outlook, which doesn't seem to be supported. This is all very new
to me though, so I may be missing something. I have noticed that later
versions of Outlook seem to support e-mail merge with other Office products.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

That's what Word's mail merge feature does -- takes a data source and creates email messages that Outlook then sends. It's available in Office 2000.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the info, I'm aware of that function, but I'm not sure it would
apply to this situation. I don't want to send MSWord documents. How would it
work if the form letter is an email? It really wouldn't work for me to copy
the contents into Word. Thanks in advance for any further help.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Who said anything about sending documents? Word acts the editor used to create the text of the message. I would suggest that you try it and see.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Guest]

I apologise, I didn't explain myself clearly. I understand perfectly how
MSWord mail merge works, I'm an advance Word user, but from what I can see
that particular application won't work for me in this case. The email is
designed by another person in Front Page, and it doesn't convert well to
Word. I can do it, but I have to do a huge amount of fiddling, which the
person who designs the email doesn't like me doing. Also, I find that when I
use the mm function in Word to email it sometimes shows up at the other end
as a word doc; not an attachment, but as a word doc. I apologise if my poor
communication has misled you. Leave it with this; my company would rather
spring for an external program to do the merge to the outlook emails they
give me rather than spring for me figuring out how to do it in Word.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

If you'd posted those details at the start, we could have suggested that you look at third-party mass mail tools, such as those as http://www.slipstick.com/addins/massmail.asp. Even with those, you may find that FrontPage isn't the greatest tool for creating HTML messages, plus you'll need to do extensive testing if you're trying anything fancy, since different mail clients support different HTML and CSS features.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Guest]

HI Sue:

Again, I apologise for any deficiencies in my communication, but I thought
that saying I was looking to buy a utility or plugin to merge TO Outlook from
Word/Access/Excel, that would have been enough information. No doubt my
error, and thank you for the further information. Front Page I'm not worried
about, because if the emails are done that way and don't work, it's not my
problem. ;-)