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Gaye Dougherty's avatar
Gaye Dougherty
Copper Contributor
Sep 13, 2018

Word Mail Merge document will not print.

I have created a mail merge document using an Excel s/s as my list of recipients.  The merge completed successfully and I saved the completed document of 50+ pages.

I want to print page 23 of the document and find it will not print.  As a matter of fact, the whole document will not print.

Please do not tell me I have to go back and set up the document over again...it has many fields and I never had this problem with Mail Merge before. 

PS I am returning to work after 2 years.  Did Word 2016 change something in Mail Merge??

Thank you,

Gaye

  • I know this is een old post but I stumbled on it by looking for something else.
    Printing a selection of pages after a mail merge has always been a problem and still is.
    The mailmerge documents are seperated by section breaks instead of page breaks.
    Printing "current page" can help, this always works.
    But if you have several pages a solution could be to first replace the section breaks by page breaks.
    (I use a Dutch Word, so forgive me if some of the terminology is not translated correctly).
    This is how it works:
    Go to "Zoeken en vervangen" (Find and Replace)
    Click "Zoeken naar" (Find (?))
    Select "Meer" (More (?))
    Select "Speciaal" (Special (?))
    Choose "Sectie-einde" (Section Break or type ^b)
    Click "Vervangen door" (Replace by)
    Select "Speciaal" (Special (?))
    Choose "Handmatig Pagina-einde" (Manual page break or typ ^m
    Click "Alles vervangen" (Replace all)

    You should be able to print from page X tot XXX without a problem.

    • EscueToRescue's avatar
      EscueToRescue
      Copper Contributor

      Petra-Van-Horen 

       

      Ok here is my issue.  I am using word 365 on my Mac.  I have successfully been able to print labels. the issue is when I go to individually edit my MM document letters, only every other one is printed to the merged documents.  In the merge preview I see all of the merged records correctly.  Yes the section Breaks are there.  I have tried to replace them with page breaks.  But when I go and merge all of the documents only the odd pages are printed.  I would prefer to not to do this using my parallels and doing this only in Word 365 for Microsoft.  Word to the wise, no pun intended, it does work in there but I would like to know if there is an answer for this in the Mac Version????

    • LP_NYC1430's avatar
      LP_NYC1430
      Copper Contributor

      Petra-Van-Horen 

      Thank you for your solution for printing selected pages from a merged doc.

      I'm a WordPerfect user and had to convert documents and data into Word and Excel.  The conversion was easier than I feared.  Everything looked fine until we tried to print pages from the middle.  Thanks again for your help.

  • Charles_Kenyon's avatar
    Charles_Kenyon
    Bronze Contributor

    Gaye Dougherty 

    Each record in a mail merge creates a separate Word Section when you merge to a document. Page numbering will restart at the beginning of each of these sections. If you have no section breaks in the main document, those will be the only section breaks in the document and the solution of replacing section breaks (^b) with page breaks (^m) will work fine.

     

    If there are page numbers, the restart of numbering will stop so that page 2 in section 6 may now be numbered page 12.

     

    Better practice is to turn on display of sections in the status bar and simply print the page.

    Printing with Multiple Sections

     

    Here is the status bar showing the formatted page number (1) and the Section (3).

    It is a five - page document that has three sections in it.

    To print this record, I would print by section and page, examining the status bar for the pages.

    The format for this is pxsx.

    To print this document I would insert the following page numbers:

    p1s7-p5s9 The page number is the formatted page number in the section.

     

    • smikes181's avatar
      smikes181
      Copper Contributor
      I know this may not apply, but a few years ago I had a sudden "would not print" issue. I ended up going back to a point the mail merge worked and figured out it was one of the records we had recently add. Then I narrowed it down to the email address associated with the record. When we print the mail merge mailing labels, we include the account email address on line two under the name. For some reason this one particular email address was throwing a wrench in the process. Never did figure out the what or why. Just a weird glitch. We did know the email address was in fact valid and correctly formatted.
    • Petra-Van-Horen's avatar
      Petra-Van-Horen
      Iron Contributor
      True and thank you. My "solution" only works for 1 page letters in a mailmerge.
  • Damien_Rosario's avatar
    Damien_Rosario
    Silver Contributor

    Hi Gaye Dougherty

     

    Mail merge is still the same old mail merge for the most part.

     

    If you have saved your document successfully (as static letter) and you find you can't print, this may be an issue with your Printer set up rather than the mail merge.

     

    Are you able to print other documents?

     

    It may also be worthwhile to show a print screen of your printer settings in the mail merged doc?

     

    Cheers

    Damien

    • AsheCosgrove's avatar
      AsheCosgrove
      Copper Contributor

      This post was a wonderful "Get Out of Jail Free" card.  We were all ready to get our holiday cards out right after Thanksgiving and then we ran into this issue.  Thank you for sharing the information.

      Cheers,

      Damien_Rosario 

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