How do I convert a WordPerfect12 mailmerge list to Word XP?

[Leon Willard]

We hava a fairly large WordPerfect 12 mailmerge list that we would like to
convert to Word XP. Anybody know how we can do that?

Leon

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I don't know for sure, but unless you can find a third party tool, your best
bet is probably to do a merge in WordPerfect that results in either one or
more tables (maximum of 63 columns each) or one row per record in delimited
format (e.g. a tab between each field).

If you create one or more tables, you should be able to open the WordPerfect
document(s) in Word using its WP converter. Then you can either save the
document and use it directly as a data source, or use it to populate another
type of data source, e.g. you may be able to copy/paste into an Access
table. If you have to create multiple tables to get all the data, you would
have to stitch the data back together again in its final format.

Using the table format is probably the only simple mechanism that is likely
to work if you have multiline data in your data source. However, leaving
your data in Word document format is probably not a particularly good idea
as connections to Word data sources can perform very poorly in Word XP.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Leon Willard]

Peter, thanks for this information since we may need it. So far, we have
discovered that Word 2003 can read the WordPerfect data file and displays
the data in a table format. From there it looks like we can sort the data as
we wish, and use it in a mail merge. We'll know how successful that is in a
few days as we try different things. Thanks again.

Leon