How to Print Labels and Form Letters with BCM and Word

re: How to Print Labels and Form Letters with BCM and Word

iNET45 — Wed, 16 May 2007 22:11:41 GMT

This is great. But.. Can you give a sample of how to grab a custom field from a form called CustomField1

I was able to find it in the db under dbo_ContactIMAPVIEW.UserField3

But Can you give us a sample db or sample word doc with mailmerge for custom fields??

Mike

re: How to Print Labels and Form Letters with BCM and Word

bcmteam — Wed, 16 May 2007 23:25:29 GMT

Good question, Mike. This is not currently supported very well and we're working to address this. The workaround is to export selected contacts to a .CSV file, then use that file as the source for your mail merge.

To do this, go to Outlook's main window.

1.) On the menu, click "File | Import and Export | Business Contact Manager for Outlook..."

2.) Choose "Export a file" and click Next

3.) Choose "Comma Separated Values (.csv)" and click Next

4.) Select Specific Records and complete the export

5.) From Word's Ribbon menu, click the Mailings tab, click the "Select Recipients" button and select "Use Existing List..."

6.) Browse to the file exported in step 4

7.) Select Other Encoding | Unicode (UTF-8) and click OK to convert the file

8.) From Word's Mailings ribbon, click Insert Merge Field and select your custom field

re: How to Print Labels and Form Letters with BCM and Word

dsparks — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:19:59 GMT

This is a great idea but unfortunately does not work to an acceptable level. We have 3 salesmen I just recently convinced to move to BCM promising that it will be better than ACT!. So far, they are ready to lynch me and the biggest problem is the ability to write a single letter and produce a label or envelope.

I spent hours creating templates and testing on a test database (about 100 contacts). I convinced them that the benefits of BCM would outweigh the problems (time it takes to click through menus to perform a simple action). When I finished and implemented on our live database, the salesmen nearly killed me. To bring up the contacts in Word takes almost 3 minutes (3112 contacts for one salesman). This should not be this slow. Everything else operates correctly on these brand new workstations.

The label function is also very complex for them and they hate using it.

I was informed by the VP of Sales that we need to migrate back to a new version of Act! if I cannot sort out a solution within the month. One thing I also like about other products is that I can call a support line (for free if I purchased their product) instead of typing a comment on a blog to get a solution or working through a newsgroup hoping I get an answer by someone who *might* know something.

re: How to Print Labels and Form Letters with BCM and Word

dsparks — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:32:12 GMT

^^ Let me add that I personally like this product. The problem is, however, that what IT likes and what sales likes are often two different perceptions of what is useful about the product. I truly appreciate your time in developing this product. I do not mean to take swings at your team, it's more frustration on my part :)

re: How to Print Labels and Form Letters with BCM and Word

CedricM — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:18:53 GMT

Hello,

Regarding your blog entry, I have the following problems:

1. The mailmerge fields available when creating a mailmerge via BCM 2007

Marketing campaign are not the same as those available via standard Outlook

mail merge (but when selecting BCM contacts).

1.a. There are subtle differences in the naming, which wreaks havoc with

templates, e.g. (in German, for 'Company') you have 'Firma' with standard

and 'Unternehmen' with Marketing campaign mail merge.

1.b. The field list for marketing campaign mail merge is a subset of contact

/ account field list plus specialized marketing campaign fields. It should

be all the available contact / account fields plus all the campaign fields.

For example, we have customized BCM contacts with a user defined field

'Brief Anrede' with the welcome text that should be written at the beginning

of the letter. We need this field because there are so many rules in German

that we can't simply program it. Almost all contacts have a specific welcome

sentence 'Sehr geeherte Herr Doctor Gates', 'Liebe Frau Melinda', ...

We can use this customized BCM account field with standard mailmerge,

because all BCM account database fields are offered during the mail merge.

We can't with marketing campaign as those customized fields (and in fact any

database field) are not offered.

This would be really great if you could patch this behavior.

Thanks,

Cedric

Marketing Campaigns -- LAUNCH FUNCTION DOES NOT WORK WHEN...

Ted Lanzo — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:43:08 GMT

you launch a direct mail print campaign... the program takes you to Word to perform the mail merge part of it... so I have done this even gone through the merge and print commands and upon exiting after printing and going back to BCM... marketing campaign page where you originally launched it -- it says nothing... i.e., it doesn't say it has been executed. If you do this with Mass Advertisment and then launch it greys out the list area, is says it has been executed and the launch button on the bottom of the page now reads RESEND... this doesn't work if you choose Direct Mail Print, IT SHOULD! Can you tell me why... this appears to be a functionality problem in the program. The receipents do not appear when you launch a Mass Advertisment campaign as they would appear in the receiptents section upon successfully launching a Direct Mail Print... it is important this function work properly!

re: How to Print Labels and Form Letters with BCM and Word

podhi — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 08:49:57 GMT

I wonder if there is a way to filter out the list of addresses i want to print by either filteringing on a custom filter field or a prebuilt filter field?

Thanks for your assitance.

Accessing the Title - Courtesy Title in a BCM mail merge

kflorian — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 01:29:55 GMT

BCM uses the word "Title" to refer to a "Courtesy Title" such as Mr. or Ms.

When one creates a _new_ Word 2007 Mail Merge through a BCM Marketing Campaign interface, all BCM Contact fields are available for insertion in the Word document, including a field called "Title" which happens to be a "Courtesy Title" as well as a field called "Job Title". All well and good. The problem occurs when one attempts to "Launch" the campaign. When one launches the campaign, BCM starts word, loads the specified document, and presents a more limited set of fields for the merge. The field called "Title" is not found an is identified as an "Invalid Mail Merge Field.

In the list of fields offered for replacement there is no equivalent field. It is still possible to do a merge with the requisite "Title" field but only if one never "Launches" the campaign.

Others have identified this problem in various forums.

Surely, this cannot be the intended behavior.

Is there a work around?

When can one expect a fix?

Ken Florian

re: How to Print Labels and Form Letters with BCM and Word

mlawsonco — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:04:18 GMT

If I mail merge a template with more than one contact how do you link the Word file to the contact?