I can't point you to a product along the lines you mention, but the
following info. may be useful:
a. as far as I know, using the out-of-the-box facilities there is no way
around the "can't open a data source located at a URL" problem. Certainly,
all the ways I've tried to work around it have failed. You can't (AFAICS),
for example, set up an Text file ODBC or Jet OLEDB connection using a DSN,
..odc etc that references the file in a way that means the driver/provider
opens the file rather than Word.
b. You could aim for a complete replacement approach to merge (cf. the
product you mention) that sidesteps this limitation
c. you could, I believe, develop a text converter, ODBC driver or OLEDB
provider capable of opening a file at a URL address. None of those things is
a walk in the park but if your dev. skills are up to it, it might be worth
trying. In any of those cases I believe that what you would have to do is
store the URL you really want in a file that can be accessed by Word, or in
the case of ODBC, possibly in a machine DSN. I've done enough with the file
converter SDK to be reasonably confident that it is feasible. You can't
avoid having either a machine DSN or some kind of file that Word can access
through the Windows file system.
d. you could copy the file
e. if you want to avoid creating anything explicitly on the local system,
you could consider a variation on (d) where you
- supply an empty Word .doc file to be used as the data source
- have a macro in your mail main document that
- opens the data source document
- populates it with data from the URL. How difficult that might be
obviously depends on the source, but for text or HTML sources you may just
be able to use Insert File (which should work with a URL, I think)
- connect to that document. It should see all the data you inserted even
though you haven't saved the document
- after the merge, close the data document without saving it

Just my 2c-worth

Peter Jamieson

wrote in message
oups.com...
Has anyone had any luck getting word to mail merge to data on a web
page?

I'm looking for something like this, but not specific to a particular
product:
http://www.vtiger.com/wiki/index.php...-in_User_Guide