Russ,

In my attempts to get this working, the procedure for transferring was tried
to no avail.

The .pst file was working within the context of Outlook just fine, so
initially, there was no reason to believe that any "transfer" was necessary.
It was only when a mail merge was initiated from Word that any hint of a
problem came up (Outlook could see the contact folders, but couldn't connect
to them). If no mail merge was needed, the Outlook file was functioning
flawlessly.

I have no idea why you say that you should "never" populate a new .pst with
data from another one via the Import feature since I have been doing this
for over a decade with zero issues...ever. Also, Microsoft provides this
functionaly as a feature within the product.

Opening the two .pst's simultaneously and copying between them works, but
it's completely uneccesaary and time consuming if you want to make sure you
get all the information from all the categories without duplication
(especially calendar holidays).

FYI - In over a decade of my experiences with working with .pst's, I've
would up with .pst's that are VERY large and have all of the various types
of Outlook items within them. I've never had any issues with copying .pst's
and/or importing from them. This particular situation was for a client of
mine who had a .pst that, I'm beginning to believe had some corruption in it
to begin with.

-Scott

"Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]" wrote in message
...
Some corrections are necessary to your post. A PST file from Outlook 97
would have worked perfectly well had it been transferred correctly and
then connected correctly to the Outlook Address Book Service. Instructions
for doing so abound in the KB and in the Outlook groups.
Creating a new PST file is fine, but you would never populate it by
importing data from another PST file. You should copy data from one file
to the other while both are open in the Outlook profile.
--
Russ Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]
"Scott M." wrote in message
...
The problem was that an older .pst file (from Outlook 97) was copied over
for use in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2003 could not properly make the
contacts available to Word 200 for the purposes of Mail Merge.

The soluion was to remove the old .pst and create a new .pst and then
import the old data into the new .pst.

-Scott

"Scott M." wrote in message
...
In Word 2003, during the Mail Merge wizard, my Outlook contacts are not
showing up, when Outlook is selected as the data source (BTW Outlook
2003 as well).

The contact folder in Outlook does have its property set to act as an
address book.

Thanks