Merge to Dynamics CRM 2016 Word Templates

INTRODUCTION

In the Dynamics CRM 2016 upgrade, Microsoft has finally replaced the painful millennium creation

that is the Word Mail Merge process. As this easy to use page (right from within the Create

Template process) instructs, they have made it easier - but still not easy enough for your average

sales professional to build on their own.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-customer-center/using-word-templates-

in-crm.aspx

In this document, we have summarized the instructions and detailed them below. Note that this

was all done on a freshly created 30-day trial, with absolutely no customizations or third party

solutions involved.

TO CREATE A CRM 2016 WORD TEMPLATE

The first step varies, whether you are a System Admin or a User.

To create a Word template as a CRM Admin:

1. As a User with the CRM System Administrator role, navigate to Settings / Templates /

Document Templates.

2. Click New.

To create a Word template as a User:

1. Navigate to the entity you want to begin your Word document from (typically, the “header”

if doing a report with detail tables.

2. Click the ellipsis (...) to find the “Word Documents” option, and select “create.

(Note: if your admin has not yet built a Word Document for this entity, you may not see

this option.)

From either location, select Create a New Template:

3. Select Word template, and select the Entity that will be the “main entity” for this Mail

Merge. I selected Contact for this, but you can select ANY entity - - a HUGE upgrade.

4. Click Select Entity.

5. This page will appear differently depending on which entity you select above.

It will always show you those three columns, identifying the relationships between the entity you

selected, and all other related entities. You can select to work with data from ANY of these entities!

6. You can find easier examples out there, but for this blog, I wanted to create a “Contact

Summary” type of Report. So, we are going to grab information from the Case and the

Opportunity from the 1:N column, the Lead to get Originating Lead info from the N:1 list,

and the Marketing List from the N:N.

Details: I selected

- From the 1:N list: Case (Contact as Primary Contact)

- From the 1:N list: Opportunity (Opportunity Customer Contacts)

- From the N:1 list: Team (Team Contacts)

- From the N:N list: Marketing List

7. Once you have selected the entity or entities you want to work with, click Download

Template.

8. You will see a document downloaded to your local systems. Click to open the doc.

9. Click Enable Editing.

OK, so far so good, right? Well, this is version 1 of this product, so there are a few gotchas;

however, once we get these bugs fixed, the rest of the process is fairly smooth.

SIDEBAR: FIXING BUGS

If you are doing this for the first time, you’ll need to make a change to Word to make the

Developer menu item appear.

1. Select File Options, and select Customize Ribbon.

2. Check the Developer box and save, and the Developer menu item will appear at the end

of your menu in Word.

While not required, we’ve had better luck by first disabling the AutoCorrect feature, as it tries

to change control names for some fields when you drop them in. To do this, while on that

same Options section, go into Proofing and uncheck all of the boxes. (Note this affects all

Word docs, so you should change these settings back after you are done building your

template.)

Not done yet! Unfortunately, the default schema does not load, which is why we need the

Developer window, to change the schema. To do so, click the Developer menu item, then click

the XML Mapping Pane button.

10. The Mapping Pane shows up to the right. Now, when I first did this, the URL we needed to

select did not appear. A few minutes later, it was there. Select “urn:microsft” as the Custom

XML Part.

11. Progress! Now we can actually see Contact fields!

END OF SIDEBAR, now back to the Word doc!

12. You can see the contact fields by of course expanding that Contact folder.

13. If you scroll all the way to the end, you can see that there are also folder links for all of the

other entities we selected way back in Step 3.

BACK TO BUILDING THE TEMPLATE

14. Now that we’ve fixed Microsoft’s bugs, we can build our template. As I am sure you realize,

now you start building your doc and adding in fields.

15. I’m going to create a Contact Summary, so the first thing I want is the fullname. Scroll

down the alphabetical list, and when you find the field, RIGHT CLICK the name.

16. Right-clicking will show the Insert Content Control Menu.

NOTE: Some more Microsoft bugs: Only select the PLAIN TEXT or PICTURE options

This is slightly tricky but if you LEFT click on the field to highlight it, then RIGHT click to get this

menu item, and then LEFT click to select PLAIN TEXT... it’ll work.

INSERTING A REPEATING TABLE

You owe me one because figuring this one out took a fair amount of trial and error but it makes

perfect sense! To create a table full of CRM data in a Word doc, first... Create a table!

1) Yes, using Word, go to INSERT / TABLE.

2) Important: SELECT TWO ROWS, and as many columns as you want (one column for each

field you want to show in the table).

3) After you create your two-row table, place your cursor in the first column of the SECOND

row.

4) Go to the right, and select a field you want in this table (ideally, the one you want in the

first column.)

a. To find these linked entity fields, scroll all the way to the bottom.

b. There you will find cryptic info that are your linked tables. Expand the list by clicking

on the arrow.

c. Find the desired field and LEFT click on the desired field name.

d. RIGHT click, select Insert Content Control, and select PLAIN TEXT. (For now, until

they fix bugs).

e. Move your cursor to the next column (in row 2).

i. I have you do this to avoid the error message described in the appendix...

Don’t worry, you’ll forget, and you’ll see why I say to do this.

5) Repeat steps 2c-e until you have filled out all of the rows in the table.

6) Select that second row of fields (cursor to far left of Word, will turn into an arrow.)

7) Find and left click to highlight the cryptic relationship name (incident_customer_account,

e.g.), and right click it, select Insert Content Control and Repeating.

8) That should place the blue plus sign to the right of the repeating row in your table.

9) Put column headings in (I like to bold the header, or put a background color in, to remind

me this is the header, the next row is the repeating rows in the table.)

APPENDIX: OUT OF BOX (OOB) EXAMPLE

The OOB Account Summary Word Template looks like this:

It has several pages, and would be quite lengthy for an account with many contacts, opportunities,

and Cases.

TROUBLESHOOTING/DEBUGGING/CAVEATS/HINTS

In this section, you get the benefit of jumping up my learning curve.

1) If you make a mistake, and put a field in the header, e.g., just CTRL/Z.... Undo it. Then,

move the cursor down a row and try, try again. Don’t try to copy a header row into detail,

or vice-versa.

2) When building a table, KEEP YOUR CURSOR IN A BLANK CELL

If you get this message when trying to add a field to a repeating group:

It means you don’t have the cursor in a blank cell in a table. Delete (twice) to make sure

there is no data in that table cell... (Again, to make a repeating table of CRM Data, first

create a WORD table).

3) NO Global Unique Identifiers (GUIDS), NO Lookup values!

I believe this is due to the bug whereby you can only insert Plain Text into the Word

template, but I was not able to get GUIDS or LOOKUP fields to print out, either in a table

or from the primary entity. Yes, unfortunately, that means my case report can’t show the

contacts involved... Let’s hope this is on the fast track for fixing...

I can confirm that I WAS able to get the following data types to print:

- Normal fields: text, date, integer

- Special fields types: Owner, Status, a calculated field value, Email, Latitude, Web, and

- Surprisingly, the Address1_Composite field rendered quite nicely on two lines in my table!

add1_rich

5009 Orange Street

Renton, TX 20175 U.S.

249 Alexander Pl.

Redmond, WA 86372 U.S.

Note that the text for this address1_composite field will scroll to match your width, so it wouldn’t

be that pretty for shorter or longer addresses, (ALMOST perfect for labels...)

- So, for example, you could also get it to look like this, for all lines, by just stretching the

right column:

add1_rich

5009 Orange Street Renton, TX 20175 U.S.

249 Alexander Pl. Redmond, WA 86372 U.S.

4) You can re-use these Word templates, and you can import them across systems. So you

might want to invest the time to think ahead, about the different “variations on the same

theme” your documents might be, and build yourself a small library. You can put these

docs out on a shared library to serve as great starting points for your (more sophisticated)

users. (Until they release the next version or two, this is NOT ready for your average sales

professional, yet. Dang close.

I’m doing this, primarily to make sure I can test many things, but I can see the benefit in

having a pre-built report that has Account info, and a Cases table, Opportunities table,

Custom entity table, etc. Then, you can just copy that template and cut out what you don’t

need for your new one, and then just add a few fields.

5) What if it just shows my column names in a repeating table, like this?

First Last

firstname lastname

firstname lastname

I bet you tried to type those names in, instead of clicking the field names, didn’t you? (or

you copied headers in...yeah, I tried that too...) Sorry, no shortcuts - go back and delete

that row, and create a new one, this time selecting the field names from the list on the

right of the doc.

Doing that does something special to the doc that you can’t duplicate by just typing the

field names in.

6) What if it shows “Click here to enter text.” in grayed out text?

This happened to me when I deleted the accountidname field from this second line. Evidently,

even when you select the field name and click delete, there are still some properties hanging

around in that cell. For example, if you try now to select a new field, it will give you the error

message explained above:

To fix this! Delete TWICE!