[Peter Jamieson]

There are no built-in facilities in either Outlook or Word to merge to a
distribution list - see some old text of mine below for further info. on
that.

Another approach which is likely to be more practical is to use Outlook
categories to tag your contacts, then select your contacts by category
and initiate the merge from Outlook using Outlook Tools-Mail Merge...

Re. the distribution lists...
-----------------------------
If you mean starting from an Outlook Distribution List, there's a big
problem because there are no built-in facilities to merge using such a list.

If you find it fairly easy to select the contacts you want in Outlook,
then you can initiate the merge in Outlook using Tools|Mailmerge.
Otherwise, here are some notes I posted a long time ago:

Distribution lists are geared to Outlook's internal needs. Neither Word
nor Outlook seems to have the facilities that a person doing mailmerge
would obviously need to make use of these lists.

If your distribution lists do not contain any nested distribution lists
and all you need in your merge is the e-mail address and/or the name of
each member in the list, you could consider the following approach
a. select the distribution list item in Outlook
b. use Outlook File|Save As to save the contents of the item as a .txt
or .rtf file.
c. Open the .txt file in Notepad or either file in Word. You should see
something like

---------------------------------------------------
Distribution List Name: the name

Members:

member1name member1address
member2name member2address

---------------------------------------------------

(without the --------------------------------------------)

If you replace the stuff at the top by

Name Address

and remove the paragraph marks at the end of the file, and save the
file, you should be able to use it as a mailmerge data source.

If what you were hoping for is that the distribution lists would be
treated like a list of contact data, with all the data for each contact
(name, title, postal address etc.) available to the merge, there are
several problems:
d. the members in a list do not necessarily correspond to contacts. A
member can be a standalone entries (just a name and address that has no
corresponding entry in your contacts/address book. A member can be the
name of a distribution list. It may be possible for a member to be other
things - I don't know
e. even the entries that you set up by selecting contacts from a list
can be misleading, because the member entry just stores a name and
address. The address can actually be different from the one in the
contact/address book record. There is no "link" to the original contact
or distribution list other than the name/address. The original contact
is not necessarily in the same contact folder.
f. as far as I can tell, there is nothing in each member's data to tell
you whether the member is a contact, a standalone entry, or a
distribution list, except that in the case of a nested list the address
field seems to be blank.

So even processing these entries using VBA is non-trivial in the general
case, although do-able I dare say. There may be some code at
http://www.slipstick.com to do it. If you know that all the members
correspond to contacts in the same folder as the list, or to contacts in
a particular folder, it would probably be quite easy to expand the list
using Outlook VBA.
--------------


Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

MoreMoney-MoreTimeOff wrote:
Hi,

I've recently done a mass mail-out to my Distribution Lists in Outlook 2003.
The problem is, the first time around I took the long way and printed
envelopes contact by contact by contact.
Is there any way that I can use Mailmerge in Word to recognize the contacts
in my Distribution Lists/Groups.
When I search for Contacts in Outlook during the mailmerge wizzard, I can
see the Groups, but they do not expand or by selecting them, they do not
input the data into the merge.

Is there anything I can do?