How do I not get duplicate salutations in mail merge if I don't know the recipient's gender?

This is bizarre problem that comes from trying to be too Politically Correct. You insist on creating a Salutation for Females and Males. I don’t care what sex they are, I just want the first name to appear at the beginning of an email. I have no identifiers for their sex and it’s over 500 contacts so I’m not going through it one by one just for your program.

Because of this problem, the First Name appears twice because it doesn’t know the sex of the individual. Is there a fix for this? If not, the program is trash to me because it’s primary function to me makes it unusable.

If you uncheck “insert personalised salutation” and go to “general salutation”, you can edit the general salutation (I usually take whichever one is showing - say the “Hello” salutation and delete it and add what I want).

Then type in (for instance)

Dear <First Name>,

and the preview box below will show you what will go into the merge. To make sure you type the correct field name between <>, hit F4 to show your data above the document, and use the field name from the top of the address list.

Hope this helps!

If you don’t want different salutations based on the recipient’s sex, you should not enable the option. You can use the general salutation that includes a field for the first name.