Data source for mailmerge not selecting all data - PLEASE help!

[Katie]

Hi all,

I am wondering if someone could please help - I am lost/baffled as to what I
may be doing wrong. I'm doing a mail merge using an excel table as my data
source. When I choose OLE DB Database Files, all of my data is selected, I
can filter accordingly and complete the mail merge. However, there are many
cells in my worksheet which contain more than 256 characters, so these come
across as incomplete. If I change the data source to be Excel Files via ODBC
(*.xls,xlsx, xlsm,xlsb), then I get the full text from my excel file, however
it appears to not include some rows and not show the information. As I really
need all of the characters, I really need to choose the data source as ODBC,
but I have no idea why it is not including some information from my excel
file.

Could someone please help me out? I have been through the help files and
can't find anything.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Try connecting to the data source using DDE.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Katie]

Hi,

I have the same trouble when connecting to the data source using DDE - that
is, it doesn't appear to contain all of my information in excel and does not
include some rows. Is there something else that I am doing wrong?

Kind regards,

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

The following is form a post a few before this one from a colleague, Peter
Jamieson

The problem is that if none of the first 8 cells in the "problem column"
contain a "long" text (i.e. a wso-called "memo" text, which in the case of
Excel means a text over 255 characters long), all the texts in that column
will be truncated to 255 characters, or worse. The trouble is that there is
no simple fix that is likely to suit everyone. The suggestion Walter
provided is one approach. Switching the connection method to DDE is another,
but that has its own problems, particularly with Office 2007. There is a
more detailed explanation at http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk but I cannot guarantee
that even that tells the whole story.

The suggestion by Walter was to include a "dummy" first record in the data
source that contained fields of sufficient lenght to ensure that Word
handled subsequent fields correctly.

If not all rows are being included. I would take a look at the record that
follows the last one that was included in the merge to try and detect any
differences in that record.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP