I have very rarely used Access before, so I am struggling to perform what would seem like an easy task.....

We have a list of subcontractors in a Access database with various information including Email address, Category (i.e. what trade they perform) and Location. I am trying to send a mass invitation to bid via email to only those subcontractors who perform X, Y, Z trades and are only located in A, B, C counties.

My invitation to bid is in Word. The way I have it set up now is that I go to "Mailings", Select Recipients (then select my database), from there I have to deselect all of the recipients I don't want to send to... I have set up a filter to include only certain trades, but I don't see that I can set up filters for two different headings.


Ideally, I would like to use my main contacts database, filter by trade and by location. Then export ONLY the filtered contacts to another database called "Job_Title_Bids", then when I set up my mass email through Word I can just select this database.... Surely this is more simple that I am trying to make it....

1/24/2014 12:19:42 PM

Have you tried writing a macro?

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/introduction-to-macros-HA001214202.aspx
http://www.proicereinc.com/Documents/MS%20Access%20(Macros%20and%20Modules).pdf
http://allenbrowne.com/tips.html

1/24/2014 1:11:50 PM

If you write a query in access to get what you want you can export that to excel and use for the merge... Might be able to use the query results as your datasource in word as well -- can't remember off the top of my head.

1/24/2014 10:39:32 PM

I know you can have the query linked directly to excel so that if you update the data or anything you just refresh the excel sheet and it updates accordingly. I don't know anything about macros or word integration though, I only use access as a workaround for doing SQL queries when I can't get the data I am working with into our database.

1/25/2014 10:16:51 AM

Awesome thanks. Maybe I will try to export to excel and using that as my data source. If not I will go the macro route. Ended up just filtering by trade in my data selection and then narrowing it down after that. Hopefully one of the solutions mentioned will work for the next bid

1/27/2014 8:56:45 AM