[Liz S.]

The columns in the mail merge recipients area don't stay in the order in
which I set them up and when I moved them, they moved back; also when I
sorted by last name, the sort didn't stay that way; yes, I 'saved' after the
corrections----it made no difference.

[Peter Jamieson]

The sequence of columns in the Mail Merge Recipients dialog box is
determined by Word. You can change it temporarily by dragging the columns,
but those changes are lost (probably when you close the dialog, and if not,
when you close the document). Word tries to recognise field names that look
like the sort of names you might have in an addressee record (first name,
last name etc.) and when it finds them, will present them in a certain
order. If you really need the columns to be in a particular order, you will
probably have to give them artificial names such as F01firstname,
F02lastname, etc. that Word doesn't recognise and which it will sort
alphabetically.

sorted by last name, the sort didn't stay that way; yes, I 'saved' after
the
corrections----it made no difference.

Sorting the /records/ should "stick", but other errors in Word may prevent
that from working. After you have set the sort seqeunce, if you can start up
the Visual Basic Edtor from within the Word Tools|Macro menu, find the
"Immediate" pane, and type

Print ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.QueryString

then copy the result to a message and post it here, it might be possible to
see a little bit more about what is going on.

(Which version of Word and what is the data source?)

Peter Jamieson

"Liz S." wrote in message
...
The columns in the mail merge recipients area don't stay in the order in
which I set them up and when I moved them, they moved back; also when I
sorted by last name, the sort didn't stay that way; yes, I 'saved' after
the
corrections----it made no difference.

[Cindy M.]

Hi ?B?TGl6IFMu?=,

The columns in the mail merge recipients area don't stay in the order in
which I set them up and when I moved them, they moved back; also when I
sorted by last name, the sort didn't stay that way; yes, I 'saved' after the
corrections----it made no difference.

Word definitely doesn't save changes you make to the order in which the columns
appear. It's a PITA. I have a lot of bones to pick with the person who
"designed" the Word 2002/2003 mail merge user interface...

I usually sort in the data source, or by going over the "Advanced" setting (for
the what used to be called Query Options), as this works at the data source
level, rather than at the UI level. If "Advanced" isn't working for you, what's
the data source and which versin of Word do you have?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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