Word/Publisher email merge issues - ms-word

Question

I've been searching for days for an answer to this issue. I'm trying to append an Access field to a base URL to customize each email in my merge like so: http://www.example.com/myItems.asp?ItemID={field}.
I tried several approaches in Word 2007, then gave up and finally tried Publisher after coming across this post - MS Word: Mailmerge hyperlinks with query get URL string with a MERGEFIELD.
In Publisher, I got everything to merge properly including the custom links (according to preview), but when I hit "send email" it wasn't passing the emails to Outlook - said 0 message(s) sent. I tried again, using a blank email template and got it to pass the email, but the email showed field names rather than the merged data.
Coming across this article regarding the field names - http://msgroups.net/microsoft.public.publisher/emailmerge-not-working-in-publishe/213664 - I clicked outside the text box as suggested before sending email but still, the field names show and not the merged data.
I'm super frustrated and exhausted. This shouldn't be this difficult! Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This shouldn't be this difficult!
I agree. I can't help on the Publisher front, but this link should help for Windows Word.
To summarise, when you insert the HYPERLINK field, do it this way:
Use ctrl-F9 to insert a field code brace pair { }
Type HYPERLINK between the braces
Select the field and update it once (F9)
Do not update this field code again. If you do, Word will always insert the same link text (i.e. the hyperlink target). People working with fields often select F9 quite a lot just to make sure things are up to date, so you have to try not to do that.
If you Alt-F9, you should see that the display text is an error message (starting with "E" in the ENglish language version of Word).
Move the insertion point so it is immediately after the E. Type the display text that you want, or, if you want a variable display text built from text + MERGE fields etc, enter that text and those codes).
Carefully remove the "E" and the other part of the error text.
Use ALt-F9 again to display the HYPERLINK field code. Click after the K, type a space, then enter the following fields and text, assuming your variable text is coming from a MERGE field called fieldname:
"{ SET X 1 }http://www.example.com/myitems.asp?ItemID={ MERGEFIELD fieldname }"
(The SET field is there to stop Word doing something else wrong. If you have more than one HYPERLINK field, you will need to SET a different variable name (X1, X2 etc.) in each HYPERLINK). This is discussed in more detail here - interestingly enough, that question was also about merge to HTML email, but I think you also have to do the additional stuff I mention above to make it all work.