It is common practice to want to perform a mail merge from Microsoft Word, using data from Microsoft Access. Normally, this is extremely easy, especially if you use the Mail Merge Wizard that you can find under the "Tools" menu after selecting "Letters and Mailings" (in Word 2002 anyway). It will lead you to choose first the Access database you want to get the data from, and then the table or query you want to use.

Sometimes however when it asks you what table or query you want to use, the one you carefully handcrafted for this purpose isn't it the list. This happens mostly if it is a parameter query (a query that the user is expected to type something into to generate the data), but sometimes erm...just for fun.

The solution? Before going to select the data file, first ues the Tools menu in Word to choose Options. On the resulting mega-choice extravaganza, pick the "General" tab. Click to make sure there is a tick in the box for "Confirm conversion at open" and hit OK.

Then, try again to do your merge. This time when you pick the Access database to merge from you will get a "Confirm Data Source" box. Here, change the option to "MS Access Databases via DDE (*.mdb, *.mde)". Click OK. The next screen should have a tab on for queries. Select this, and abracadabra, the query you want in the database should be available for selection.

On the slight downside, the Poorhouse has found that the result of this is sometimes data that you can't change the order of dynamically in Microsoft Word. You can of course go back to your Access file and reorder it there before attempting the merge.

Thankyou Microsoft for kind of telling us this. Less thanks for building this cryptic half-doesn't-work feature into your programs.