Conditional Mail Merge

Elizabeth Lea

Hello, all! We have been working with a Conditional Mail Merge for a few years now and, with Blackbaud's instructions, it's worked really well. However, recently, some of my new co-workers got new laptops and it no longer works for them (but still works for me). The Dialogue Box with “Word Cannot find its data source” appears for them. Clicking on it and selecting one of the two options does not get us to the mail merge, either. We have tried to troubleshoot and have even tried rebuilding the mail merge from scratch, but nothing helps. Has anyone else encountered this? Does anyone have any suggestions for what we could try to do to fix the merge?

Christine Robertson

@Elizabeth Lea Since it works for you and not others, I wonder if this is more related to Drives and/or version of Microsoft tools than it is RE.

Whitney Shelton

@Elizabeth Lea If it says it can't find the data source, i think it means that the document containing the information you want to merge into the letters isn't being found. Maybe try saving the word documents and exports in new locations and make sure that they are saved as compatible with whatever Word version they are running.

Fernando Ibarra

@Elizabeth Lea
I recently received a new laptop and had to reset to new path drives for mail merging.

Carrie Powell

@Elizabeth Lea, as Whitney mentioned, the users will likely need to remap the path to the document. I also had to change the file mapping within the conditional merge document so that it found the new files.

Elizabeth Lea

Thank you everyone for your suggestions!! The problem ended up getting solved by switching word files from the .docx to the old .doc format.