Posts Tagged ‘Integration’

MS Word Mail Merge

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
By Claude Von Roesgen
For those of you who know and love Microsoft Word you may have been longing to use its mail merge features with your QuickBase data. QuickBase offers Exact Forms to merge QuickBase data into an HTML template generated by MS Word, but this capability doesn’t address the requirements of printing envelopes and address labels. So what’s the easiest way to access your QuickBase data directly from Microsoft Word’s mail merge features? The answer lies in using QuickBase’s ODBC driver called QuNect ODBC for QuickBase. This ODBC driver is available from http://qunect.com for a free 30 day trial. Installation on your desktop or laptop computer is quick and easy.   Then you can jump right into Microsoft Word 2007 and click on the Mailings tab and then the Select Recipients button.

Existing List

Then click on Connect to New Data Source   Select Data Source

Then choose ODBC DSN.
Data Connection Wizard

Then choose QuickBase via QuNect.
Now you’ll need to choose your QuickBase table.

Select Table

You can edit the recipient list.
Edit Recipient List

Microsoft Word allows you to apply filtering and sorting criteria. It even allows you to find duplicates. The rest of your mail merge conforms to the standard capabilities of Microsoft Word.

Having an ODBC driver for QuickBase opens up alot of possibilities beyond mail merges in MS Word. You can use Crystal Reports or MS Access to generate highly customized reports with sophisticated headers, footers and page breaking. You can flow data into worksheets easily to apply the power of Excel charting to your QuickBase data. You can use FuzzyDupes to dedupe your contact table after importing a list from a trade show you attended. Or you can create a linked server to QuickBase in SQL Server to facilitate moving data between SQL Server and QuickBase. The possibilities are endless!

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