Word 2008 Mail Merge Manager disappear issue

Hi all,

I'm not sure any of you have seen this before, but it's now happened here at my work place on two different laptops (both white 2007 macbooks running 10.6.8, happened about 6 months apart).

Both of the users of these laptops regularly do mail merges here, but in both cases, one day the Mail Merge Manager just disappeared without a trace.

- cannot uncheck and recheck the menu list to make it appear
- tried to launch it from Envelope template window, that didn't work
- tried f9 to see if it was hiding off screen somewhere, that didn't work
- Word quit and restart did not make it come back
- power cycle of machine didn't work
- was checking around for some kind of default "Normal" template to try to create a new one if the old one got corrupted somehow based on something I read online, but this appears to be advice for a different version of Word. Couldn't find a "Normal" template in the ~/Applications/MS Office folder.

Currently, I'm reinstalling MS Office 2008 on one of the laptops now to see if that'll do it... but if anyone has any clue what else I could try, I'd be grateful.

Thanks!

follow-up

I'm completely baffled. A complete re-install of MS Office Suite 2008 (w/all associated updates) has NOT corrected the issue.

Any help would be extremely welcome!!!

still trying...

I've now found and renamed the Normal.dotm file in ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/ and renamed it to see if it's a corrupt template that's messing with the Mail Merge functionality. This did not fix the issue.

Solution Found

Hi, in case anyone has this issue in the future, I think the following is the solution for the problem:

Launch Font Book & follow the Font Weeding procedure here: http://word.mvps.org/mac/fontweeding.html

Then fix some corrupt word preferences... Test preferences/settings: http://word.mvps.org/mac/DamagedPrefs.html

Cheers!