Problems with mail merge / serial letters in Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac OSX

When I try to use a ConfTool export to create a mail merge on my Apple MacBook with MS Office 2011, it does not work, and sometimes office even crashes. What can I do to make the export compatible with my version of Microsoft Office?

Unfortunately Office 2011 for Mac seems to be buggy and you have to consider several issues if you want to use mail merge to create a serial letter (form letter, circular letter) on OSX.

Please proceed as follows:

• Open the export from ConfTool in Excel and save it in the newer XSLX format. Use this file instead of the XML/XLS-Export from ConfTool.
• Remove all empty columns.
• Remove all duplicated columns (sometimes the paper ID or the person ID  appears several times in an export).
• Remove all columns you do not need to make the file smaller.

Please use the cleaned file for your mail merge; usually it should work well.
Sometimes there are still problems like strange special characters at the end of long texts (for instance if the abstract text is long), but there doesn't seem to be a solution to those bugs.

Alternatively, we can recommend using Microsoft Office on Windows, or please try the free Open Office, as it seems to work well on OSX. If your problems persist, please contact us.