I wanted to share a recent experience with my adult readers, especially those who are learning and using power tools for the office. There are so many power tools available to use when we use Microsoft® Office applications or OpenOffice and other tools. One of the most commonly used is the merge capability which can really make your life a lot easier and allow you to send messages to people that are personalized just for them – always good in business, right? I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Another power tool, for advanced users only, is the customized form in Outlook. It’s possible to customize the forms you use in Outlook, though there are certain precautions that should be taken to ensure that other people aren’t adversely affected. I decided to customize my Contacts form, which I don’t share with anyone, to help me keep track of information about my contacts that are specific to my business. One item I wanted to track is whether a contact has opted out of future emails (yes, hard to believe, but even I've had some opt-outs!). Remember, if you’re in business, that you’re required by law to allow recipients to opt out of your distribution. The whole idea was to use this custom form together with a merge to send out smarter emails to my distribution list, allow me to maintain my data in one place instead of more than one to save me time and make fewer mistakes, and use my time more wisely.

Well, Microsoft® will tell you how great their tools are, but they don’t tell you that are limitations. In the seriously time-consuming process of customizing and testing my form, and then importing all my data from a spreadsheet so that I had it all in one place, I learned that you cannot access those user-created fields when you do a merge, so it was all for nothing. I tried merging from Outlook to a Word file – didn’t work. I tried merging from Outlook to a Publisher file – didn’t work. I tried merging from both Word and Publisher to Outlook, and again it didn’t work. So all my time for that was wasted. In fact, it’s really difficult to use those user-created fields at all – you can’t import into them or export from them without buying a third-party program. So, it’s a good idea whose time just hasn’t come yet – perhaps in future versions of Outlook it will become practical.

One more note: I also discovered that you cannot perform both a catalog merge and an email or mail merge in the same file in Publisher. You must perform only one kind of merge at a time.

But there are ways to perform powerful merges that can use your custom data to save you time and produce a really quality product that helps you do your business smarter, not harder. If you want to learn how to use a merge effectively, it’s covered in our Microsoft® Word Power Tools class, even though we don’t just talk about Microsoft® products. So, if that’s something you need, then we’ll be seeing you in class!