When you are in Zoho CRM and select (using tick boxes on left) a list of records - and then click the mail merge button.,,,

it opens Mail Merge template.

Then you have to click "Preview" or "Merge" to do the actual merging.

95% of the time I have been getting the error "Unable to pull records from your data source. Please try again." for months. 5% of the time it works.

Every time I get online chat support the solutions suggested are:

1) Create a new template

2) Check your data sharing settings

It never helped.

But today by trial and error I have found the problem.

It only works if the selected records in the CRM view are in alphabetical order by the first column in the view.

I have now created special filtered views for the set of records we wish to mail merge and set the column to alphabetic order.

Here is my work around: (You can adapt it to work in your own case)

- create a field called Mail Merge Status (pick list with 2 values - 'Done' and 'Not Done' - default to 'Not Done').

- so records which havent yet had this particular mail merge letter sent yet are marked Not Done.

- created a filtered view to show only Not Done records.

- made sure the first column in that view was sorted by alphabetic order.

- run mail merge from that view.

- i also created a quick Macro so user can set records to Done after mail merge finished.

But it is a bug that should be fixed as i suspect your online support team may be spending a lot of time on this - and the solutions offered don't work.

The error only occurs with Zoho writer mail merge - the MS word plugin version works - but i didn't want to have to install that on all staff PCs.