[Peter Jamieson]

Initiating the merge from Outlook, as the others have suggested, is
probably the best long term approach. For existing merge main documents,
you may well need to change some of the merge field names.

If you already have merges that use the "initiate from Word" approach,
and need to try to fix the problem rather than change your approach,
unfortunately, although I've seen this problem reported many times, I've
never been able to replicate it here or get to the bottom of it, but
a. does the connection fail even if you start with a completely blank
document with no previous mail merge data source, or does it only fail
for existing mail merge main documents?
b. do you ever get as far as seeing a dialog box listing the available
contact folders (I would guess not, because I think this dialog tries to
retrieve a list of "tables" and that's what's probably causing your
error message)
c. when the connection is established from Word, Word uses the
Access/Jet OLEDB provider and its Outlook IISAM to get the data. This is
quite a complicated method. It may be worth working through
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322215
although I think your error message is more specific than the general
one mentioned in there.
d. close Word
e. Have a look in your temp folder (e.g. typically

C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Local Settings\Temp

for a text file called schema.ini. If you find it, have a look at its
create/modification dates. Are they from before the time that this
stopped working? Then open the file in Notepad. If the schema.ini has
been created/updated by the Outlook IISAM, it will have at least one
block of information for each contacts folder that the IISAM was able to
see in Outlook.
f. Save (if you want) and delete that schema.ini. Ideally, delete as
much else in that folder as you can so you can see what's going on in
the following steps.
g. restart Word and try creating a new mail merge main document
connected to an Outlook Contacts folder. Is a new schema.ini created?

Another thing you could check is whether you are able to create
files/folders in the following folder:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\SYSTEM\MSMAPI\1033\

(although in your case the locale ID 1033 may be different). If you
cannot, I would change the permissions for that folder so that you can,
and try again. The reason is that when Word opens a Contacts folder as a
data source, the name of the datasource is something like

C:\Program Files\Common
Files\SYSTEM\MSMAPI\1033\~~~_virtual_file_~~~Perso nal Folders|

I don't know much about these Win32 virtual files, but if Word can't
create one, it probably won't be able to connect to Outlook data.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

David Arrants wrote:
I am getting an error, unable to find tables in data file, when i try to open
word and do a mailmerge from outlook contacts.

I have done a repair in both Outlook 2003 and Word 2003.

And still no success.

How can i fix this ?

I am 16 years in the business of support with MS and am really stuck on this
one.

thank you.

david arrants