MailMerge Doc Prepared with MSWord and Vista

[h_g]

Working with Vista and wishing to open a MSWord Mailmerge document it becomes necessary to access the mdb database. The instructions are to use the Jet 4.0 Service Pack to access this .mdb file. However there are no Microsoft downloads for Jet 4.0 Service Pack for Vista. The most recent seems to be for WinXP.

Can the WinXp download be used? If not, is there any other way to access the mailmerge file?

[Villeroy]

Possibly you will get a quick and competent answer in some Windows forum. You want to use a Windows feature with OOo, but the feature as such is not related to OOo.

[h_g]

Well, it is in the sense that what I simply want to do is to open a mailmerge document prepared with MSWord 2007 in OOo any way possible on a machine running Vista Home Premium.

[Villeroy]

Yes, Microsoft uses to play well with it's own stuff. However, database support by 3rd party software requires some toolkit. If that kit is not availlable for Vista ... [shrug]

Excel or text (*.csv) may be an alternative option.

[h_g]

In exploring further, it appears that the reason the last Jet 4.0 Service Pack was released for WinXP is that the Vista MSJet40.dll incorporates those changes. Now, if you follow the OOo instructions for (connecting to and) creating an .odb data base from the .mdb data base everything works until you get to the point of editing the new database. At that point, OOo tells you that the .odb data base is unreadable.

I tried downloading an mdb reader program. That wasn't able to read the file so I sent it to the program's author who said he couldn't open it either. Then, I thought that maybe it had become corrupted, but I was still able to use it to open the MSWord mailmerge file with MSWord 2007. Apparently, Microsoft has done something with this latest version of the mdb data base file that has made it incompatible with other 3rd party programs. It may require someone with the latest version of Access to determine what the problem is.