I am very new to Salesforce, and am trying to figure out how to go about creating a mailing list. I created a "All Accounts and Contacts" report, set my filters appropriately, got my results and... accounts which really ought to have showed up didn't. So I removed all the filters (All reports, All time), ran & exported the report and some of my accounts aren't even being included in the query to begin with. Those accounts exist, I can manually search for them and confirm they exist. I can get SF to show me a report of All Accounts, but then it doesn't come with any Contact information (names, phone numbers, emails), which makes it useless for a mail merge, especially because spouses aren't included on the same line, so Excel thinks every new contact is a new merge.
I can go back several years and look at mailing lists compiled by my predecessors and this has been an issue for a while.
Does anyone know why our database does this? I've had MUCH simpler databases which do this MUCH easier. Salesforce is supposed to be the biggest/best out there right? Why can't it just spit out ALL my accounts with contact info included?
Thank you everyone. Evan Ponter's solution is the one that has worked, especially using the "Formal Greeting" and "Informal Greeting" fields. Really sucks that to put together a FULL report of ALL accounts I'll have to do 2 downloads like Ryan is talking about, but it is good to know this is the best option. Now we can stop searching for a better answer and just use the best available option. Thanks!
