mail merge not working with office 2013

Anonymous
2013-03-08T16:24:00+00:00

Trying to do a mail merge with office 2013.  I've done this for years with other versions of office (2003, 2007, 2010) but it's not working with 2013 for some reason.  I'm following all the steps, but the emails aren't getting sent.  Is there some way that the profile or something is set up wrong so that word isn't sending this properly? I've also tried to send via outlook, but in outlook I can't choose an excel spreadsheet for the list of contacts. 

What is wrong with this?  someone plesae help me!  My outlook profiles are all messed up becasue i use icloud to sync the calendar and contacts, but i use pop/stmp (whatever that means) for my email....

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-08-25T03:42:45+00:00

    Why doesn't the functionality work as it should? I used to be able to do this easily in Office 2010. Now it just won't work and you are asking me to download some tools as a workaround. I really would like to speak with someone to walk me though this.  I have done what I always did and exactly as described in the How to if this site. Yet, emails are simply not sent. Please help!

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-08-04T03:39:37+00:00

    An IT Department knowing anything about Mail Merge?  You've got to be kidding.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-08-03T23:11:27+00:00

    I just had to shorten my column titles, and this took care of the issue I was having with my mail merge.  Out of 75 columns on the Access datasource, only four mail merge codes were affected and they happened to all be over 40 characters.  Once I downsized the titles to these four columns, the problem was corrected. 

    This makes me believe that somewhere along the way, there was a limit imposed when they created 2013. Whether they did or didn't, my IT isn't cluing us in.  Just thought my little nugget might help some people.

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  4. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-08-03T22:56:42+00:00

    The 40 character limit on the length of the field names is not new to Office 2013.

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-08-03T18:47:44+00:00

    I'm having the same issue with my merge field codes being able to be properly merged from an Access database.  In researching this on my end, I found that the new MS Office 2013 has a limit to how long your merge field codes can be.  The titles can not be longer than 40 characters in length.  If you adjust the column titles in your database to be less than this, you should not have any problems.  I did this and now, no issues. 

    Plus, as Doug also mentioned above, there are certain symbols you can not use.  "One thing to note is that the field names in your data source must contain only alphanumeric characters (No @,#,$,%,&,(,), etc) and the field names must not start with a numeric character (0-9)."

    Hope this helps.

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