Mail Merge - "Find" feature and new field not working

[Jan]

Hello~

I use the mail merge system to complete legal documents for over 150
defendants. It's been really great and saves me so much time! However, it's
just started giving me some real headaches as of yesterday and I am wondering
if I've pushed mail merge to its limit! (Does it really have a set number of
fields you can have in a given document? Does anyone know?)

In the past, when I've needed to update an existing form with a new field,
it hasn't been a problem at all. It works like it's always been there.
Yesterday, though, I tried to add a dollar amount as a new field and it just
shows as a "0." I'm not sure what the problem is. I've done it the same way
I always have. I tried refreshing the list, saving and closing the document,
the info list, rebooting, replacing the field in the document, telling the
program which info list to use again, etc. I just don't know what's wrong.
When I go to the "add recipients box," I scroll to the right and on that
page, the field shows as a "0," as well. It's like it knows there's
something that should be there (obviously if it has the new column and title)
but it is having a hard time grabbing the figures even though it's the same
format as the other figures that are working fine. It's very frustrating to
me.

Also, I have 150 recipients. It's time consuming to find all of them by
hand so I've always just done a search with "find" in the recipients box.
This has always worked but now it's not anymore. This happened the same time
as the problem with the new field.

I guess that I could try and see if it works to redo the forms. However, I
did a little test with a blank doc and the "find" option and just that new
field aren't working. So I don't really want to take the time to update +100
pages if it's not even going to work.

Does any Office guru know how to help me? I'm using Word 2003. I would
*love* some help. No one else in my office really uses mail merge like I do
and I'm very stuck. With so many defendants, there are document deadlines
every day and I really am a up a creek without a paddle if I can't figure
this out soon. Thank you!!

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP on news.microsoft.com]

Sounds to me like you are not using mailmerge for its real purpose that is
to create multiple documents, one for each record in the data source, rather
than just one document at a time for a particular record from a set of data.

Rather than using mail merge, I would start with a template with a userform
that contained a combobox that would be populated with the data from what is
now your data source and then when an item was selected in the combobox and
a command button on the user from was used, it would transfer the data into
the document that was being created from the template.

See the article "How to create a Userform" at:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Userforms/CreateAUserForm.htm

or, see the following pages of fellow MVP Greg Maxey's website :

http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Create_and_employ_a_UserForm.htm

http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Populate_UserForm_ListBox.htm



--
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, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com