How can a MERGEFIELD be longer than 255 characters?

[borrodell]

Conducting a mail merge in Word, but as well as address/name/email/greeting,
i want one mergefield to be an entire paragraph - making it longer than 255
characters.

How can I make Word bring in a piece of merged data that is longer than this?

Thank you for your help!
James

 

[borrodell]

I've now looked round all the discussion forums here, noting that its a
common problem, and noting the common fixes. Just to let you know what I've
tried in vain:

1) Ticking 'Confirm Conversion at Open' seems to have no effect to anything
- when I open the document I get no confirmation alert or option screen.. am
I supposed to?

2) Padding out the first row in my Excel sheet with 400character paragraphs
does nothing to aid the truncation - when viewing that record 6 out of 12
fields show 255 out of the 400 characters of the paragraph, and the other 6
show nothing. The second record is still truncated.

3) Setting TypeGuessRows in the Jet registry entries to 0, in order to get
Excel to look at all the rows does nothing, and when I make 50 rows brimmed
with 400character paragraphs, it still does nothing.

So... what should I do??!

Thanks,
James

 

[Peter Jamieson]

This limit on character count depends on a number of things including the
type of connection you make, so you may be able to do what you need by
changing that.

However, if you want to get away from arbitrary limitations in the data
source, you could put your texts in a Word file, bookmark each one with a
different name (e.g. "text1", "text2" etc.), and put the bookmark name in
your data source instead, e.g. in a field called "Mytext". Then use a nested
field such as

{ INCLUDETEXT "c:\\mergedocs\\mytexts.doc" "{ MERGEFIELD mytext }" }

where all the {} are the sort of special field braces you can insert using
ctrl-F9.

You can do something similar using AUTOTEXTs.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Peter Jamieson]

1) Ticking 'Confirm Conversion at Open' seems to have no effect to

anything
- when I open the document I get no confirmation alert or option screen..
am
I supposed to?

You have to go through the process of connecting to your data source again.
After you have selected the data source (and pressed OK/Open/whatever) there
should be an additional dialog that lets you specify a particular connection
method. What's in there depends on the type of file you are trying to open.

I'd go through that route before looking at the other approaches.

FWIW I find it astonishing and irritating that this kind of limitation not
only still exists, but has actually been introduced in the last 5-10 years.

Peter Jamieson

 

[borrodell]

Thanks Peter - I think changing the connection is key, I'm going to try that
out this afternoon.

The paragraphs being imported into word from excel are being collaborated on
along with the other fields, so I need it all in one document - otherwise
your suggestion for seperate text files would work well. Thank you for the
idea!

James

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Another thing you can consider if the column count is small (up to Word's
maximum) is simply to Select the entire sheet in Excel, then cut and paste
into Word, and use that as the data source. Not good for ease of use, but if
it is good enough for you, it should at least be automatable.

Peter Jamieson

 

[borrodell]

Did it! I didn't realise that 'connecting at open' meant opening the data
source rather than the word document - so once i started from scratch it
offered me the option of DDE.. which i took.. to my immense pleasure it now
works!

Thank you

James