Using Mail merge together with SharePoint Lists is a real pain

Question

Unbelievable but using a normal SharePoint list and no document library is a painful thing. The customer wants to use a central address list an extended contact list in SharePoint 2013 Foundation and Office 2013.

He wants to filter the addresses and then use this partial list for mail merging with Word 2013.

First I tried to export the SharePoint List to Excel or Access. But filtering is useless you will always get the whole list. The only workaround to get a partial list is to use views.  I personal think for the most end-users this is no practicable way.

Next I made a live link to SharePoint with Access, creating the queries and starting Word mail merge from Access. But this isn’t working because Word needs a local database and you always get an error that the database is open exclusive mode.  The only workaround is to make a local database and to reimport the SharePoint list if something is changing.

Using Outlook for mail merging is also ill-conceived because you don’t get easily extended contact-fields. You have to use existing fields but it doesn’t work with lookup fields.  And you get the whole list there is no way to filter it before.

With Excel the same problem can't use live sync together with queries. Filtering on the Excel side is possible and to copy the only visible filtered data with copy and paste for a second source. Unfortunately the customer doesn’t want to work with Excel.

There is no way to make a direct connection from SharePoint to Word mail merge. You have to write a macro. But again you get only the whole list and you can’t use lookup fields. That is way filtering afterwards in word is useless in our case. By the way Office 2013 doesn’t include the right driver you have to download Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0 driver separately.

All together this simple task was a complete nightmare.

What is missing for a real integration?

1. A common SharePoint Database Connection provider is missing.

This includes one provider regardless of using 32 Bit or 64 Bit version of Office. 2. Support of SharePoint pre-filtered lists in the Office applications without a view. 3. SharePoint should have a icon to connect directly to Word. 4. SharePoint should be able to export only selected items to the Office applications. 5. Support of lookup fields list in the Office applications.

It seems that Microsoft works too much in the cloud world and is forgetting the on premise customers. They didn’t make their homework.

Sorry for the hard words but this is not the integration that I expect from a formerly called Office Server and we are already at version 15 of Office

Answer 1

Just a quick note to +1 this issue. It seems to be one of those seemingly obvious features that are conspicuously absent and not obviously difficult to implement.

Answer 2

the only way I could do this is by setting up a mapped drive that contains the Access db...then you can import/link a SP list to it and start the mail merge from Access...not Word...lousy - but works

Answer 3

better way is to just use SSRS