Problems with label mail merge in Word 97

[ruudi bear]

Please help my friend .She has Word 97 running on Win XP Pro 2002.

She is creating labels through mail merge.
We follow the merge process picking the label type(the labels are a fixed
Avery size (J8163).) When we merge to create the labels the margins are
completely different to the actual label settings. It is almost as though the
settings are being overridden somewhere. Indeed when they are printed, they
are about 1cm out of position.
In addition to this, there should be 14 labels per page (2col x 7 rows), in
print preview it shows this layout. But in the main document and indeed when
we print it only prints the first 12 labels (2col x 6 rows).
I also tried selecting specific records and printing only records 1 to 5 .
Bizarrely, this actually merged the first 14 records instead of the first 5.

Also the bottom of the 7 labels on the page, is repeated on the top of 2nd
page and can only be highlighted on the 2nd page, almost as though it is a
ghost appearing on one page but in reality only on the next page

Is there a bug with this, or a patch I need to rectify this. I have been
doing mail merge for many years now and have never experienced problems like
this so any help that can be offered would be greatly appreciated.
My friend is disabled and we are trying to do this to save her writing all
her labels by hand.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Try unchecking Word Tools|Options|Print|"Allow A4/Letter paper resizing"

It is probably also worth checking that your printer driver is set up to use
the same size paper as Word is expecting to use (the two settings are not
necessarily identical) - you can check Word's view of things in Word
File|"Page Setup" (I would expect Word to get this right based on the Avery
label type), and the printer driver's view of things in Word
File|Print|Properties.

Peter Jamieson

 

[ruudi bear]

Thanks for that I will try it on her pc when I am there next week. I did
check the printer settinggs but not the paper resizing option.

Do you also have any ideas as to why when I tried merging only records 1 to
5 that this actually merged records 1 to 14 records instead of the first 5?

Many thanks
Juliet

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Do you also have any ideas as to why when I tried merging only records 1

to
5 that this actually merged records 1 to 14 records instead of the first
5?

I am only checking with Word 2003 right now, but the same principle probably
applies in Word 97.

This partly depends on how you are restricting the records to the first 5.

If you are doing it in the small dialog box that appears "Merge to Printer"
or "Merge to New Document", by specifying that you want to merge records 1
to 5, then Word does that, but still tries to honour any <<Next record>>
fields and fill in the data. because the data source actually contains more
records, Word gets them and outputs them. (I can just about see a rationale
for this if you were doing a slightly complex "Letters" or "Catalog" type of
merge -
with Labels it makes less sense but that's just the way it is).

So to restrict the numbers you will need to use the Query Options button in
the mail merge helper to apply a filter. However, there's no way to specify
"records 1 to 5" in there: you have to specify a comparison with a field in
the data source. So it is helpful if your data source has a field that
contains a record number: then you can do "record number" Less than or equal
to 5.

If you are already using Query Options, then the problem is likely to be
with the SQL that Word generates from your filter options. But let's not try
to cross that bridge before we get to it...

Peter Jamieson