Pages 5.5 Mail and Data Merge

Last october I used this great tool on my Macbook Air. Now I want to use it again on my new Mac, but I get the error when running:

The document “xxx.pages” could not be exported as “xxx.pages”. You don’t have permission.

And back in Pages Data Merge: -10000: Pages got an error: AppleEvent handler failed.

What to do?

Regards, Linda

Not to take away from what you have done Sal, but this is why it really is not a solution for stuffed up software by Apple.

It is like the retread that keeps blowing yet another puncture that you have to keep patching over the patches.

When something is as avoidable as Pages 5 and 6, clearly - just avoid it.

Peter

Hi Sal, can we expect a solution from you or Apple, because I really liked it. It would be also be nice if you import new or changed records that the assignments stay in place. btw Inlike Pages and Numbers and are very happy with your solution. Thank you, Linda

Sal,

The AppleScript write permission issue with 10.12.{2,3} involving saves and exports has been proven fixable with the following AppleScript incantation just prior to exporting, or saving a file:

-- fix for macOS Sierra 10.12.{2,3} export/save permissions error. Create the empty file before exporting to it.

-- source: Yvan Koenig, 2017-01-18, http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?pid=188721

close access (open for accessexportDocumentFile)

This has resolved my export issues from Pages v5.6.2, and v6.0.5, both on Sierra, where they consistently failed beforehand.

That would be great if it's solved by the new Sierra. Creating empty files myself is not the way to go, because the script creates a new directory, so I probably have to wait or find out how to install the beta.

My post was intended for Sal, as the implementor, to assess, and determine if it is suitable/possible for inclusion within his application. It won't be of any value to you, as an end user, in concert with Sal's current Pages Merge application revision. It is unknown when Apple will fix Sierra, and/or Pages itself to resolve this issue without a kludge.

That single line of code did fix the same underlying write permissions error that I was having in custom AppleScript that was Saving/Exporting to a file.

Hi all,

I've just written an applescript doing simple data merging from numbers to pages. I'm on latest Pages & Numbers version and Sierra 10.12.4, and the script runs smoothly. Please feel free to use it and give some comments. Hope you find it useful. 8-)

https://github.com/ipMang/iWorks-mailMerge/tree/core-mail-merge-function-only

Sal - thanks for this. It's been a life saver over the past 3 years. Do you know of a way (or is it possible to tweak your app) to merge data from a numbers sheet or CSV directly into mail.app to create personalized email messages? I sometimes ned to send customized emails but don't need to attach customized docs to them...

Thanks!

This actually worked! It's very tedious and I will likely never make labels with Pages again, but you can end up with a page of labels with multiple records and not just the same address over and over. Since I only had 3 labels on my page it was easy. I can imagine 30+ would be awful to work with, but still doable. It took me awhile to figure out Sal's example above, so here's a visual of my data file.

In your spreadsheet or data file, put a number next to your placeholder titles and put each in separate columns. Using my example below, on your Pages doc, simply put your first record as Title, First, Last, then your next record would be 1-Title 1-First 1-Last, and so on. Although not ideal, you can make as many columns as you need. My data file looked something like this:

Title First Last 1-Title 1-First 1-Last 2-Title 2-First 2-Last

Mr. John Smith Mr. David Johnson Mrs. Amy Jones

Mrs. Isabel Aguilar Mrs. Susan Titus Mr. Sam Thompson

There may be a better way to configure the data file, but this worked for me. I only figured this out after finally finding Sal's post and researching and failing for about 10 hours. Hope this can help someone else.

Apple really needs to update Pages to include an option where multiple records can be on the same page with the same placeholder. But for now - thanks for this work-around Sal!

I have this exact problem too! OS 10.12.5, Pages 6.2, Numbers 4.2. Numbers 09 is present on the computer but not open. The pages doc with script tags and the numbers sheet with some data highlighted are both open before I start the Data Merge App. I have quit more or less everything else and tried it several times, always with the same result.

Help!

"I've already created an example label template that uses script tags and am working on a script for transferring spreadsheet data to the labels. Interesting. I'll post when I get all the issues resolved and working correctly." Have you found a solution yet? Thanks

Hi Sal,

I have just download this app for the first time tonight and it has been a real life saver. Reading through the threads from over the past 3 years I can see you have thrown a lot of passion and sweat into this app. Great job and thank you for sticking with it. I found out about this app from Macworld and ThoughtCo. You are making an impact. Thanks.

Hi Sal,

this message ist fantastic for me! Thank you very much. It seemed to be a very good job! I´m a "normal" user and i missed the data merge feature a lot. Your Pages Data Merge App give us the data merge feature back!

Questions: 1) Is there a possibility to get as the result not single pages files, but one document with the whole merge datas? In iwork 09 there was a switch to choose it. 2) A little nice icon is missing :-)