Outlook mail merge with Work fails and no solution; woeful support from Microsoft

Question

I have just spent a whole day trying to get a mail merge with Outlook and Word to work, something I have been doing for year for a small group. It is the one feature that keeps me using Outlook Classic because when it works it makes sense.

The process is:

1. Select the contacts within a category in Outlook
2. Select mail merge and initialise Word
3. Create the template in Word
4. Review and send.

It is a streamlined process and as far as I can make out unique to Microsoft.

However, after selecting Mail Merge the initialisation with Word hangs.

After contacting MS for support, they repeatedly failed to identify this support article that I eventually found:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/classic-outlook-mail-merge-hangs-trying-to-initialize-word-127d6d7b-ae7b-49e4-8933-f308da77f5e7

It would appear that a recent update has broken Office yet again.

Even after experiencing the pain and frustration of repeating myself umpteen times to support, this was still ignored.

Eventually I was redirected to speak with commercial support today, and the automated attendant just redirected me online.

MS are supposed to have released a fix in late May: Current Channel (Version 2505 Build 18827.20000)

But I cannot find it in my Windows Update list nor where to download it.

On top of all this, I have just received an email from Microsoft saying I have cancelled my M365 subscription. I have not.

I just want this fixing. The one bonus of this experience is that I have just discovered how to do mail merges with Gmail, which saved the day for me yesterday.

Hopefully someone can direct me to the update. Regarding MS support, I have discovered how poor it now is, relying on so-called AI rather than having competent support staff.

Answer 1

Office updates are not released via Windows Update anymore (older MSI installations still use Windows Update, though).

To update recent (click-to-run) versions of Office, start Word (for example) and click File > Account > Update Options > Update Now.

Answer 2

Use my Merge Tools Add-in that is contained in the MERGE TOOLS ADD-IN.zip file that you can download from:

https://mergetoolsaddin.com/

Extract the files from the archive and read the:

“READ ME – Setting up and using the Merge Tools Add-in.pdf

to see how to install and use the various tools.

Using those tools, it is possible to perform the following types of merge that cannot be done with Mail Merge “out-of-the-box”:

• Merge to e-mail messages either with or without attachments, with the documents created by the merge being sent as either Word or PDF attachments or as the body of the e-mail message .  The email messages can, if necessary, also be sent to CC and BCC addresses and the subject of the message can include data from a field in the data source.
• Merge to individual documents in either Word or PDF format with the filenames being supplied by the data in one of the fields in the data source
• Many to One type merges, which can be used for creating documents such as invoices where there are multiple records in the data source that have common data in one of the fields
• Merging to a document that will include a chart that is unique to each record in the data source
• Merging a document with Content Controls
• Merging a document that contains Legacy FormFields
• Duplex Merges
• Merging to a printer that will collate and staple the output created from each record in the data source.

The requirements for using the system are:

• The mail merge main document must be of the Letters type, though that does not mean that the output cannot be sent as an e-mail message where relevant.
• For the Many To One, Merge with Attachments and Merge to Individual Docs utilities, the data source may be either a table or query in an Access database, or in the form of an Excel worksheet. For the Chart Merge utility, see the Mail Merging with Charts document that is included in the Merge Tools Add-in Zip file for additional requirements for the data source for use with that utility
• For a data source in the form of an Excel worksheet, the field names must be in the first row of the worksheet and there must be a field name in all of the cells in that row that are within the range of columns that contain the data.
• For both types of data source, the field names must contain only alphanumeric characters (No @,#,$,%,&,(,), etc) and the field names must not start with a numeric character (0-9). The number of characters in the field names, including spaces, must not be more than 40.

The MergeTools Add-in will NOT work with the “New Outlook”, which is just a re-badged version of Windows Mail and like its predecessor, it does not support automation and hence will not send the messages created by the MergeTools Add-in.

Be aware, that any messages that you had tried to send with the “New Outlook” will have been placed in the Outbox of the original Outlook and they will be sent as soon as you revert to that version of Outlook.   If you do not want that to happen, you should put Outlook Off-line, or disconnect your computer from the Internet.

For a demonstration of the use of the facility, prepared by a Microsoft employee, see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj_s3cdfVDY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGXZ3aQN7oo

Answer 3

Many thanks Stefan.

The solution is to roll back to the previous version. The current one, contrary to the MS support page, has reintroduced the bug.

So if anyone else runs into this, roll back to the May version. It has taken days to fix this, so I hope it saves others the frustration!