Major mail merge problems using Word 2003 and Windows XP

[cdb]

The business I work for has recently upgraded from Windows 2000 to XP and
Office 2000 to 2003. All the mail merge documents we have were created using
Office 2000.

Since the upgrade we are having major problems as follows:

The Query Criteria we enter doesn't save so we need to re-enter every time.
When we enter dates it is Americanising them (ie changing them from
dd/mm/yyy to mm/dd/yyyy)
When we finally get it to work it always pulls the first record from the
spreadsheet out regardless of the criteria - even if they shouldn't be pulled
through.

Does anyone know if these are general compatability issues, or is it
something specific to the versions our company has purchased?

 

[Graham Mayor]

You may find http://www.gmayor.com/mail_merge_labels_with_word_xp.htm and
http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm helpful in overcoming at
least some of the transition issues from Word/Office 2000.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[cdb]

Brilliant - that's helped me with the dates, so thanks a lot. On the first
link you have below, I tried to follow that and when I click to link to Excel
via DDE, it said it couldn't connect that way - is this a normal problem and
is there an easy solution?

Cheers.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

What exactly does the error message say?

If it says "Word could not re-establish a DDE Connection to Microsoft Excel
to complete the current task", the first thing to check is that you have not
checked Excel Tools|Options|General|"Ignore other applications"

NB, although all your existing applications should work, assuming that you
always used DDE (the default in WOrd 2000), the DDE method only lets you
connect to the first sheet in a workbook.

Peter Jamieson

 

[cdb]

That's the message. I think I've got around the problem now though. For some
reason a buch of the letters still worked, so I'm using those as a template
and it seems to have solved the problem. A little strange, but I can live
with that.

Thanks for all the help.