Mail merge doesn't see all records in Access query

Question

Office 13 running on Win 8.1.
I have a query in Access that show 4 records when I run it. If I specify this query as my data source (select recipients) and then choose to edit the recipient list, there are only two records! The query in Access looks like this:
SELECT Membership.[m-nbr], Membership.[m-first], Membership.[m-member-since], Membership.[m-pick], Contact.[c-zip], Regions.[r-region-name], Regions.[r-region-director], Regions.[r-region-email], Membership.[m-member-since], Associates.[a-first-name], Associates.[a-id]
FROM ((Membership INNER JOIN Contact ON Membership.[m-nbr] = Contact.[c-nbr]) INNER JOIN (Regions INNER JOIN [Region/State] ON Regions.[r-region] = [Region/State].[rs-region]) ON Contact.[c-state] = [Region/State].[rs-state]) LEFT JOIN Associates ON Membership.[m-nbr]
= Associates.[a-nbr]
WHERE (((Membership.[m-pick])=True) AND ((Associates.[a-id]) Like "*A" Or (Associates.[a-id]) Is Null) AND ((Year([m-member-since]))=Year(Date())))
ORDER BY Contact.[c-zip]; 
If I remove this part: "((Associates.[a-id) Like "*A" Or (Associates.[a-id] is Null AND" then all 4 records show up in the recipient list.
In short, members can have multiple associates, but only the"A" associate is to be included in this letter. (associates have the same number as the member, with an a,b,c etc. appended. A member number could be 8741 and an associate number 8741A. 
Why is this happening? Thanks, ~Steve
Steve Woodward

Answer 1

Hmm, I tend to work in SQL mode when creating queries in Access - in that case, it doesn't change what you write. But I see that in the tabular Design mode it does change to ALIKE and that it works OK - something I wasn't aware of. I read that ALIKE is supposed
to allow "%" and "_" even when the database is in "Jet mode. 
FWIW in ANSI mode, I would not expect LIKE "%a" to work in Access but it should work from OLE DB
But in any case, it still works OK here, so still not sure what is wrong.
As a workaround, it might be necessary either to export the query results from Access, then use the exported data as your source, use the query to create a new table and use that as the data source, or connect using DDE (to do that, in Word, you have to
check Options->Advanced->General->Confirm file format conversion on open. Then go through the connection process again and select the .accdb/.mdb. If it's a .accdb, you will have also have to check "Show all" when you get to the "Confirm Data Source"
dialog box. At that point, you need to select the "MS Access Databases via DDE" option from the list (even if you have a .accdb, which isn't listed in the file types for that connection method).
All of these approaches have their disadvantages (e.g. DDE may not connect easily and probably won't return Unicode data correctly) but may at least give you another avenue of investigation.
Peter Jamieson