I've found that the defaults for the other values in this dialog box work just fine, so I don't usually change them. However, I do recommend that you explore the ODBC Setup dialog and understand the various settings and their impacts. For example, you may want to set your DSN to Read-Only to prevent accidental modification of data.

Through Traffic, Merge Left!
With a data source defined, it's now possible to create a mail merge in Word.

Let's start with a new document. From the Tools menu, select the Mail Merge option. This brings up the Mail Merge Helper dialog shown in Figure 2. Click on the Create button and, for purposes of this example, choose Form Letters. A button labeled Edit will appear to the right of the Create button, but ignore that for now.



Figure 2: The Mail Merge Helper dialog box

Clicking on the Get Data button drops down another menu with several options. Choosing Open Data Source brings up the Open Data Source dialog box (see Figure 3). At the bottom is a checkbox labeled Select Method. Make sure this checkbox is checked, and click the MS Query button. (If you don't have MS Query installed, this is when you'll be prompted to insert your Office CD to install MS Query.)

Clicking on the MS Query button brings up MS Query with the Choose Data Source dialog box open (see Figure 4). This lets you select the data source you created earlier.



Figure 4: The Choose Data Source dialog box

Note that the Use the Query Wizard... checkbox is checked. This will bring up the wizard to build data selections. (If you want to use SQL, uncheck this box so that you can key in your own select statement.) When you press the OK button here, you get the next dialog, which shows you the wizard and asks you to select a file and fields.

Clicking on a table in the Choose Columns dialog (see Figure 5) shows you a list of the columns, or fields, in that table (or file, to us old guys). You can select all or just some of the fields.

For this example, select the customer number, name, and address fields from the customer master file. Then, click on the Next button to bring up the Filter Data dialog (Figure 6), which allows you to select the criteria that the query will use to return data.

Here, you pick the field you want to filter on, choose the condition for selection from the drop-down list, and key in the criteria. Pressing the drop-down list on criteria (the rightmost field) will show all the values in the table for that field. This might take a few minutes. I think it's easier to just key in what you want. In this dialog, you can also choose multiple criteria and join them using "And" or "Or." For this example, I've chosen customers whose ZIP code is 85254, although I might want to choose customers whose ZIP code is like 85254 so that I can get those records that have the ZIP+4 (in that case, key in 85254%) .

Pressing Next on the Filter Data dialog takes us to the Sort Order dialog (see Figure 7). It isn't necessary to specify a sort order, but it's easy to do. Just choose the field (or fields) you want to sort on and specify ascending or descending.

Pressing Next here takes you to the final step in the data selection process, where you get the chance to bring the data on home!

The Finish dialog (Figure 8) offers the opportunity to return the data, view or edit the query, and save the query. If you think you'd re-use the query, you should save it. This will save future steps, as you can go straight to selection and choose a different set of records.

When you click Finish, you are returned to Microsoft Word. At this point, Word will warn you that you have no fields in your primary document and offer you the chance to set some up. If you had selected Mailing Labels in the Mail Merge Helper dialog (Figure 2), this is where you would be prompted to choose the label type.

Clicking on Insert Merge Field on the Merge toolbar (upper left corner of Word) will bring up a list of the fields available from your query. For this example, select CNME (customer name), CAD1 and CAD2 (address lines 1 and 2), CAD3 (city), CSTE (state), and CZIP (ZIP code), as shown in Figure 9.

When you put them in the document, they look like the image in Figure 10.

In Figure 11, press the Merge to New Document button. The result will be one page per record for each record in the record set.

Figure 12 shows the first page of the merged document.

As you can see, merging directly to Word involves a number of steps. However, the steps are easy and many of the choices can be saved. You really don't need to set up a data source more than once, and you can save queries you use repetitively.

The steps are all pretty sensible and orderly, and it doesn't take a lot to go through them, but the results can be pretty powerful. I encourage you to work with this as much as you can. In my next column, I'll show you how to use VBA to automate the merge function and the selection of data. This would give you a macro-based solution to present to end users so that they don't have to get into the mechanics of a query.

Chris Devous is the Director of IT Systems Development at The Antigua Group, Inc., a Peoria, Arizona, garment manufacturer. Chris has been in IT since '82 and lives Arizona with his wife, three children, a bird, two dogs, a cat, and various marine life forms. He can be reached by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.