"...error in initializing provider. Catastrophic failure"

[Gator]

I hope y'all will bear with me, I'm very much a newbie flying by the seat of my pants here. What I'm trying to do is access a remote MySQL database using mail merge in Microsoft Word. I have installed version 3.51.12 of MyODBC, as I read here that it fixed a lot of the "catastrophic failure" messages people were getting, but it didn't help. I'm probably doing something wrong somewhere, but my Google-fu is failing me, as a lot of the results that come up when I search seem to be about ASP or VB or some other application that I'm not using.

In the MyODBC applet, when I click "test" I get the nice little "Success; connection was made!" popup, so I know it's not a username/password issue. But when I go to do either a mail merge or "insert database" in Word, when I get to the "Data Link Properties" dialogue box, clicking "Test Connection" always results in this error: "Test connection failed because of an error in initializing provider. Catastrophic failure."

I'm still able to access the data in the "Select Data Source" dialogue, by right-clicking the data source and choosing "Analyze in Excel." It imports all of the remote data right into a spreadsheet, so it doesn't seem like there's a connection problem. However, if I right-click and choose "View in Browser," I get a popup saying "Data provider could not be initialized." The provider appears to be "Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers," which I think is correct. I've played around with the connection string to no avail.

I'm hopelessly lost. I have Googled extensively and searched this forum, but it may be I don't know the right terms. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Again, I'm very new at this.