Mail Merge Length

[Suzanne Myers]

Am I to assume that for some idiotic reason, Microsoft Word developers have
forced their own subjective length restrictions on Mail Merge fields??
Adding to my obvious frustration is the MS support page that is "not
available".

http://support.microsoft.com/error.....com/support/word/usage/mailmerge/default.asp

Does anyone have an idea on how to force a longer length in a Mail Merge
field (and no, I don't want to set my document up as a form).

 

[Peter Jamieson]

There are indeed length restrictions that I would rather did not exist. In
some cases they have been introduced by a switch to using OLEDB providers to
get daa from the data source and, I suspect, a poor implementation of the
code that does it. So in some cases you /may/ be able to get better results
by switching to older methods (ODBC or DDE) (in Word 2002/2003, use Word
Tools|Options|General|"confirm conversions at open" to give you a shot at
that. Unfortunately using DDE increases the complexity of the whole thing
(because Access or Excel has to be installed and has to run). Alternatively,
you may be better off "rolling your own" merge, using ADO to get data from
your source and inserting it into your document using VBA.

Can't help with the support page I'm afraid - please note that none of the
people who post answers in this group works for Microsoft as far as I am
aware, so you will probably need to use their website's feedback facilities
to comment on missing links etc.

Peter Jamieson