I've been struggling with this also; from Jeff G's posts I did the complete
re-install of Office 2000 also; but no luck. (My system is XP)

On another thread "Mail merge and fax", I had posted my question and Peter
Jamieson suggested saving to different versions. Before attempting to create
the merge/form letter, I saved as: "Word 97-2000 & 6.0/95-RTF". This solved
the problem for me. I believe the hang up comes with Word 2000 and 2003.

"Cindy M -WordMVP-" wrote:

Hi ?B?SmVmZiBH?=,

I did a complete re-install of Office 2000, and now DDE works (doing
reinstall-repair did not fix problem). Now just a question of how long this
will work before it breaks again. I guess I better switch over my merges to
use something other than DDE? Pretty sad that this highly used way of
working is so unstable.

Yes, MS has a sad history of abandoning perfectly good technology because
they're following the path of some new development. With time, the customer base
forgets that something else/better ever existed...

My personal preference for version compatibility/reliability is ODBC. The only
drawback with this (or any other connection method) is that it doesn't pick up
any of the numeric or date formatting from the original file. With Access that's
not such an insurmountable problem, as one can define a query with the desired
formats. The solution isn't as simple for Excel, meaning you could be spending a
lot more time adding formatting switches to the merge fields in the merge
documents.

If you have datasources/worksheets you use repeatedly, with new main merge
documents, it would make sense to create sets of AutoText entries for the merge
fields you use a lot. Add them to the mailmerge toolbar (or your own
supplemental merge toolbar) so that you can access them quickly.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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