The mail merge is started from outlook. The entire form is custom. There are
several additional pages of fields. It looks like it was created using the
basic contact form. You lost me with the 'User Defined Fields in folder list
for the folder'. These folders in Outlook from which the mail merge is
started are Exchange Public folders. Please elaborate.


"Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]" wrote:

You didn't say how you're performing the merge. Basics are that you need to start the merge from OUtlook, not Word, and any custom fields you want to use must be defined so that they show up in the User-defined Fields in Folder list for the folder. If the fields aren't available to a folder view, they won't be available to a merge either.

The substitution feature won't help you here, I suspect.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003
http://www.turtleflock.com/olconfig/index.htm
and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
http://www.outlookcode.com/jumpstart.aspx

"JCH" wrote in message ...
My client is having problems with mail merge using a custom contact form. The
form shows all the proper fields and the properties for the Exchange public
folder show it is using the form. I can enter data into a new entry with all
custom form fields. When I run that new contact in a mail merge against a
Word 2003 .dot file, I get 'Invalid Merge Field' on all the custom form
fields. This same mail merge works fine with a similar contacts public folder
in the same Public Folder hierarchy. I do not know how the custom contact
fields were populated in the folder that fails to merge.

I have published the from from the original .oft file to the Organizational
Forms folder and the form shows up correctly under the 'Actions' tab.

The option to substitute a field for the invalid merge field appears to show
me only the standard contact fields. I haven't check each possible
substitution field but they look almost identical the standard contact fields.

Help?