I have created a huge file of addresses in the Office Address Book and have put all those people I send Christmas cards to in a CHRISTMAS CARD category.
When I have followed the instructions from the Help menu it puts the labels in alphabetical order of the first name.
How do I get it to print them in the order of the person’s last name? It must be possible since this was created as a separate data field. If so why can’t I find it easily from the help file?
Please reply before Christmas!
Compliments of the season.
Bill Bailey
Did your data wind up in the form of a table? It should, if you’re doing a simple mail merge. To sort, just pick the “Sort…” item from the Table menu.
Out of curiosity, why does it matter in what order you print them, so long as they all get printed?
I know exactly what Bill Bailey is referring to, and it stems from a glitch that has persisted in Outlook for several versions, now. I’ve got Outlook 2002 (part of Office XP), and it’s still doing it - I can’t vouch for Outlook 2003.
In short, you can tell Outlook to display names as “Out, Early” and “Bailey, Bill.” If you open the Contacts list in Outlook, they’re displayed correctly, in alphabetical last name order. But when you select names from the list, it presents them as “Early Out” and “Bill Bailey,” and alphabetizes them by the first name.
The bad news is that I’ve never figured out how to beat the sucker. The only success I’ve had is to pull the names out into an Excel spreadsheet, sort them there, then use that spreadsheet as the data source for the mail merge (similar to what Max Torque is suggesting, but mail merge doesn’t produce a table, AFAIK - it just produces a new document consisting, for example, of a series of envelope pages to be printed).