[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

FWIW, I do maintain large databases in Excel and then use them to produce
mail merges in Word. How many records do you have? One specific advantage in
Excel (aside from the ability to deal with more records) is that you can use
Freeze Panes to keep the heading row and any desired number of columns in
view all the time so you don't lose your place.

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Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"YOMAMAPAWA" wrote in message
...
On Apr 23, 5:50 am, "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:
Also, note that 48 MB is above the maximum allowable size for a text-only
Word doc (the limit is 32 MB). Unless the document contains graphics or
something else besides text, there may be other problems ahead.

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Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"Graham Mayor" wrote in message

...

Transfer the table to Excel and sort it there.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web sitewww.gmayor.com
Word MVP web sitehttp://word.mvps.org


YOMAMAPAWA wrote:
I do genealogy and I'm building monster tables. They are useless if
not complete, for purposes of sorting by spouse, place or date of
birth, parents, etc. When I reach a certain size I get that message.
The largest, currently, is 48,000 KB. They are simple text tables, no
graphics or bells and whistles, and I work in Normal view. What do?

Thank you both. Disaster. How limiting. I'm an absolute newbie at this
but an old programmer from the sixties. I'll have to build a new
program. HA! I don't have a clue where to begin. I'm attempting an
interactive search database using Word. Looks impossible. All I want
is COLLATION. I can't believe Word customers keep coming back with
such a strict limitation on their work. What do businesses do? Not
collate? Cut their vendors off when they become too many? I have 15
columns - surname, first name, surname spouse, first name spouse,
parents, surname mother, birth/death/marriage year, ditto month, ditto
day, ditto country, ditto state/shire/province, ditto county/commune,
ditto town, ditto parish. If ANY of these columns cannot be sorted,
the whole thing is useless. Any solutions? Should I buy Word 2007
Professional?

Graham, when I open Excel all I see is a sea of cells. I don't have a
clue - tried - how to copy my Word file into Excel. I've just scarcely
learned how to Merge/Split Columns. Using these products is EXACTLY
like being a member of a bovine herd, wandering aimlessly in idle
search of something tasty - no direction, no instructions - unless you
count the help files, which protocol of use seems to have no rhyme nor
reason. Like the cattle. If I had had to learn Cobol, Basic, or
Fortran - EVEN RPG - in this manner, I would still today be using a
collator to hand-sort all the data. Or sitting on the floor sorting
cards by color!