Office for Mac will no longer mail merge documents to email in HTML format

Anonymous
2018-01-08T15:34:29+00:00

Word will no longer mail merge documents to email in HTML format (fails with message "Word was unable to mail your document" and "Word could not finish merging these documents or inserting this database").  However Word successfully mail merges documents as text.

Mail merging of HTML documents has worked for many years but seems to be broken in the latest update of Office for Mac

Details:

Word V 16.8 (171210)

Outlook V16.8 (171210)

Existing Profile

Data source: Word Document

Fails on new document with one merge field only (nothing special)

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2018-10-20T18:58:36+00:00

Thanks @LindsayLindsay 

It seems changing the font does affect it.  We failing with Caibri, but changing to Cambria seems to make it work.

Thanks for this!

It solved my problem - it's stupid that changing the font from calibri to calibri light solves the problem - Microsoft what are you guys doing?????!!!!

FYI I'm running word 16.18

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Anonymous
2018-07-12T18:16:16+00:00

Thanks @LindsayLindsay 

It seems changing the font does affect it.  We failing with Caibri, but changing to Cambria seems to make it work.

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Anonymous
2018-07-27T07:05:59+00:00

Great solution!!! It worked for me aswell !!! 

If the Word font is Calibri... "Word was unable to mail your document" error message, and no email is being sent. 

But if changing to Cambria, it works again, sending with html format. 

But..... why should it not work depending on the word font? It's a bug, even considering that on previous version worked fine. 

Please review and amend this bug.

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Anonymous
2018-07-12T17:58:50+00:00

I'm hoping this helps someone...

Not being able to send HTML emails via mail merge seemed to be caused by the document's font not be tagged as (Body).

When the font was set to Calibri (Body) in Word, the mail merge worked.

When the font was set to Arial, the mail merge did not work, and I got the "Word was unable to mail your document" error that others have gotten.

The HTML DOM has the tags <body></body> -- these are the main tags that house content in an HTML document.  This may factor into the DOCX-->HTML conversion process...

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Anonymous
2018-08-20T16:21:48+00:00

I can confirm I was having the same problem and the font change fixed the problem.

I opened the document, 'Removed the Headers' and once opened, SELECT ALL, change the fonts, saved it, and relinked the document to the original Excel file.

Once this was done, I was able to SELECT ALL, change the font back, and save the document, and the links maintained and the issue doesn't occur again.

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Anonymous
2018-08-15T22:26:02+00:00

I would suggest that you make sure you have selected the entire word document when you change fonts.   

 Looking at the success & failure modes, it seems to be simply the inability of the merge to parse the HTML document.  By selecting the entire document and changing the font you are essentially rewriting the document in an updated format.  This is a guess since I can only look at the success & failure modes reported and can't run any true debug.

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-03-06T17:13:05+00:00

    Workaround:

    You may roll back to Word 15.41 version as a temporary workaround. Refer to: How to go back to Office 2016 for Mac 15.xx versions from 16.xx

    ======================

    My company automatically updates Word, Outlook, Excel, etc. to the most updated versions. Even if I tried to roll back the version, I wouldn't be able to because this requires "administrative" privileges (and, again, it would also auto update to the most recent version ... which SHOULD be the working version). Also, it seems as though this is a ridiculously complicated process. Can you PLEASE provide an update as to when this is going to be fixed? I've sent recorded videos, there are MANY people complaining that this isn't working (and also sending recorded videos), and this hasn't worked for MONTHS!! What is the timeline for fixing this? 

    Because Outlook isn't compatible with any of the plugins that allow for mass emailing (they're all compatible with Gmail), I am reliant on the seemingly simple mail merge functionality between Word and Outlook. I cannot manage my work without this working properly. 

    Again, when will this be resolved? What more do you need to get to a resolution?

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