Text Encoding Dialog -- Mail Merge Document

Question

I have a puzzling problem going on with a process that requires a mail merge template (Word 2010) and a text file to supply the list of mail merge names to the mail merge template.

It works correctly on the development desktop, but the first trial user is getting a dialog asking for the encoding of the text file. It offers UNICODE (UTF-8) as the default, which is correct.

The puzzling part is that this problem ONLY appears when the user opens a mail merge template after she has saved it to her desktop. When she opens the same mail merge template from the network location where the templates are stored, she does not get that dialog. She likes to copy the mail merge template, make some editing changes for a specific letter, and then merge it with the names in her text file.

The text file is created from a query in Access. I export it from within Access to the user's desktop so it will always be present when they want to create a new letter, and they don't have to worry about where the Access file is physically located.

Why should Word behave differently with a document saved to the desktop? Does anyone have any insight? Or maybe a good site to search for more info?

Answer 1

I don't know. We didn't try that. I'll look into it.

Answer 2

Does the same issue occur if you export the Access Query data to an Excel Workbook and that is then used as the data source?