Troubleshooting Mail Merge

If you are having trouble with mail merge from NewViews, the most common causes are:

• spaces in file names or directories
• path, to use the / or \ character
• removing a data source
• Vista & Windows 7 - UAC User Account Control

All printing is performed using Microsoft Excel ©, which makes all of Excel's extensive formatting options available to NewViews printing. When printing documents in NewViews, it does not matter if Microsoft Excel is open or closed. That is to say, if Excel is open beforehand, it will still be open afterwards and if Excel was not open beforehand, it will not be open when NewViews finishes printing.

This is not entirely yet true between NewViews Mail Merge and Microsoft Word. If Microsoft Word is closed when you start a NewViews Mail Merge, it will still be closed once the Mail Merge has completed. If on the other hand, Word is open before you run Mail Merge, an error will occur because NewViews cannot take control of Word in this situation. A future version may address this issue.

spaces in file names or directories

NewViews is a platform independent program.

Never, ever use spaces in file and directory names!
Windows operating systems do allow spaces and even seem to encourage you to use them, but DOS, MAC OS X and UNIX operating systems have problems with them.

path, to use the / or \ character

NewViews prefers the use of the slash ("/") character in file paths.

A path points to a file system location by following the directory tree hierarchy expressed in a string of characters in which path components, separated by a delimiting character, represent each directory.

The delimiting character is most commonly the slash ("/") or the backslash character ("\").

Unix and the Internet use the slash ("/"), i.e. https://newviews.com/
Microsoft Windows use the backslash character ("\"), i.e. c:\nv\nv2.exe

removing a data source

One of the most common problems with opening a previously created form letter is that the source data file no longer exists or is on someone else's computer. The easiest way to correct this situation is to tell MS Word to remove the link to the data file. You can then re-link the form letter to a data file that resides on your computer.

To remove a link to a data file, (Word 2000 and 2003) do the following:

1. Open up the form letter.
2. Click on "Tools - Mail Merge".
3. In the box that appears, click on the "Create" button underneath the "Main Document" heading.
4. Select "Restore to normal word document …".
5. Click "Yes" in the confirm box.
6. Save the file.

To link the form letter to a new data source, do the following:

1. Follow the instructions above to remove an existing link.
2. Click on "Tools - Mail Merge"
3. In the box that appears, click on the "Create" button underneath the "Main Document" heading".
4. Select "Form Letters…" and choose "Active Window"
5. Next choose "Get Data" underneath the "Data Source" heading
6. Choose "Open Data Source" and select your data file.
7. Save the file.

Vista & Windows 7 - UAC User Account Control

Microsoft has added new security features in Windows 7 and Windows Vista, User Account Control. Because of the new UAC security feature, programs can no longer send scripts from one program to another without being validated by the administrator. These security features are proving troublesome when performing mail merge in NewViews. One way to overcome this problem is to turn off that validation procedure in Windows. However, turning of the validation is NOT recommended by Microsoft. So in order to correct the problem we have created two options you could follow:

Leave Word open with a blank document

Option 1 (Easy Option):

1. To overcome the validation you could simply leave Word open with a blank document when performing mail merge in NewViews.
2. Word will come up with a prompt asking the user if an SQL command can be performed. Click on "Yes" and your merge documents will popup.
   
3. Please note that word might close and reopen. This is not an error it is simply reordering the documents.

Edit the Windows Registry

Option 2 (Editing the Registry):

1. This option is a permanent fix, and only needs to be performed once. First open up the Registry Editor. To do this click on your start icon, and then on Run.... type regedit.
   
2. Click on OK to run the regedit program.
3. Locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options
4. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5. Under Name, type: SQLSecurityCheck
6. Double-click SQLSecurityCheck.
7. In the Value data box, type: 00000000
8. Click OK.

Please Note: This tutorial is based on Word 2007, if you have other version the registry path will be different. The paths for other versions for Word are listed below.

• Word 2003: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options
• Word 2002: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Word\Options