First off I have tried to do a little homework with this and searched the UT for past threads about this because I'm sure this has been talked to death, but I was unable to answer my question. Maybe I'm not searching on the right words.

I'm just trying to learn how to use MSWord 97 with VFP in doing a mail merge. Besides the fact that I have a client you needed a mail merge *really fast* using the data he had been entering into the VFP app I wrote him.

First off, I just tried using the Mail Merge wizard in VFP to see what it did. Everything worked fine in the wizard. I chose a normal VFP table as the data source and had it open and create a new empty merge document in word97. Then inside of word97 in the new document, I created a quick letter and inserted the merge fields into the letter from the word97 pulldown. I then sent this file over to my client, and placed the file in the exact same spot that it was located on my drive, which in this case was the root of the c: drive. His data is exactly located in the same spot that mine was, so I thought that the word document would find it just fine. However when he went to open up the word document it said:

Data source name not found and no default driver specified.

So correct here if I'm wrong but it sounds like my client doesn't have the appropriate ODBC drivers or something for this to work. I read in the past UT threads the word97 doesn't read VFP tables, so I assume it uses ODBC to open them. The only problem with that theory is that my client has VFP 5.0 installed on his pc and the former in-house programmer had run mail merges with VFP in the past several times, so I can't figure out why he would be missing something. Does anyone know what the mail merge wizard does so that word can see the data source, and furthermore, why it wouldn't work with my client??? The only thing different is that I'm running NT Server 4.0 and he's running win95.

Next I downloaded Cetin Basoz's Mail merge class, because really I would much rather do this whole thing write within OLE using automation. But when I tried to do that I keep getting the message:

Ole lDispatch Exception code 0 from Microsoft Word: Word was unable to open the data source...

I am grateful to anyone that can help me out here. -Rick