Can I suggest again that you contact MS Support (In the UK you will probably
have to contact "MS Professional Support" as the poroblem involves more than
one product from their point of view), especially since it seems that you
have a brand new copy of Office 2007, in which case the support should be
free (unless your copy is an OEM version).
I have tried to bring this problem to the attention of MS, and would report
it myself via MS Support, but unfortunately, I have been unable to replicate
the problem on my systems here (probably because I'm not doing real merges
like this at the moment), which leaves me stuck when I am asked further
questions and no-oone else provides me with an answer. One of the things
I've been asked for is crash dump info. which of course I cannot provide
(and AFAICS no-one else can provide unless Word actually crashes, which it
does not appear to do. Even info. from the Windows Event log that is created
when /you/ have to stop the Word process might be useful.
Have you had the same experience that "Robert A." mentioned in this thread,
i.e. that once the merge had gone wrong on a machine, it never worked again
on that machine? If so, are you in a position to try the system restore
approach that I suggested?
I have been reading threads and posts all evening trying to find any solid
information about this issue, and virtually every other time this topic
has
been posted it has been met with a scolding for not including enough data,
or
a hand slapping for not wording the question correctly.
IMO that is always a shame, but FWIW there is another side to these things,
which is that people who are genuinely trying to help do not always have
enough info. to go on. In fact, the less common the problem, the more likely
that is to be the case, because the chances are that it is being caused by a
very specific combination of factors. It is quite common to spend quite a
lot of time researching a problem, then discover that you cannot get any
further without asking some (potentially relevant questions which
frequently receive no response.
--
Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
"ccstamper" wrote in message
news
Bob, Thank you SO much for sharing what you've learned and confirming, for
so
many, that this IS in fact a problem and not unique at all. I have
spent/wasted countless hours struggling with this, both in Word 2003 and
now
on a brand new machine with Office 2007 out of the box, etc. I've even
re-formatted and reinstalled to 'factory fresh' my entire machine in an
attempt to get this mail merge "feature" to work as documented, thinking
perhaps I had copied or restored some bug or problem from the old pc.
I have been reading threads and posts all evening trying to find any solid
information about this issue, and virtually every other time this topic
has
been posted it has been met with a scolding for not including enough data,
or
a hand slapping for not wording the question correctly. I was getting
pretty
disgusted with the attitudes of these non-answers. Thank you for your
gracious and generous help. Just to have postive confirmation that there
is
a problem, and some solid suggestions on working around the issue,
supplied
by someone generous and truly interested in helping others, has me signing
off tonight on a much more positive note. Thanks for taking the time to
make
a difference.
"Bob" wrote:
Also, if anyone has come up with a solution that doesn't involve going
with
an add-on or another product entirely, please post it. I'd love to see
this
problem resolved in a better way.
"Bob" wrote:
I've been having the exact same problem, and I've found that it isn't
just
limited to Office 2007; I've seen the same behavior on a machine with
Office
2003.
I've researched this problem in depth 3 times now, including posting
the
issue here twice, and I haven't found even an inkling of reason as to
how to
resolve this problem. I goofed around with a few things that seem to
help,
but Word still hangs frequently whenever we try to send out a large
mail
merge. I'll post these tweaks below.
I'm just glad to see that finally my company isn't the only one
experiencing
this problem. It's one of the most frustrating troubleshooting issues
I've
had to deal with. The problem happens so randomly that's near
impossible to
find any fix that works consistently. Using 2007, you start a mail
merge
(using the lovely ribbon now), select recipients (we always use an
Excel file
as the source), click Finish and Merge, type a subject, and send as
HTML
(sending as Plain Text is a whole other issue). Sometimes we'll get
through
thousands of e-mail without a problem, sometimes we won't get through 2
without crashing... again and again and again. I tried this on 3
different
machines, one with Office 2007, one with Office 2003. Both experienced
the
same problem. I then tried a mail merge with a cleanly formatted
machine with
a fresh install of XP and Office 2007. Again, the EXACT same problem.
Theres
no rhyme or reason to it. I dont know whats causing the problem, only
that,
at one point, it was working beautifully, and at the next, PLOP. I
suspect
that Windows updates are the cause of this problem. We didnt make any
other
company-wide installs during this period when mail merge stopped
working.
So this leaves us users with the following options:
1) Wait for Microsoft to first of all acknowledge this as a problem,
then
release an update that will fix it. I'm not holding my breath for this
one,
but I'm sure it will happen eventually.
or,
2) Use an alternative product. I toyed around with Open Office as they
also
have a mail merge feature, but I could never get it to work. However, I
just
came across the following add-on tool: Mail Merge Toolkit
(http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/). This tool, among other
things,
says that it makes merging more "reliable in operation." I purchased
one
license for my company and so far it seems to be working. We sent out a
mail
merge with 10,000 recipients this afternoon and it didn't crash once;
no way
would we have had this kind of consistency using Word alone. Really
it's
rather ridiculous that we ended up having to pay to get this feature to
work
when we should have had it to begin with, but the Toolkit is relatively
cheap
and at this point I'll take it if it works. And its a miracle if it
does.
Weve been having this problem for months and Im at my wits end. I
honestly
recommend this tool to anyone whos experiencing this problem.
Here are the tweaks I was using before I found this tool if anyone is
interested and doesn't feel like shelling out any money for this
problem:
1) Keep Outlook open and set it to Work Offline. Any interruptions such
as
Send/Receive attempts seems to bring about a crash. Disable your
network
connection if you have to.
2) Don't save the Word document you're using for the mail merge. Copy
your
e-mail text into a new document, DON'T SAVE IT, and execute the mail
merge
from there. Don't ask me why this affects anything, but it does.
3) If you're sending out a large number of e-mails (in the thousands),
break
your source file down into chunks of about 1000, maybe 2000 records.
Also, I only ever used Excel as a source file, so I don't know how well
this
system works with other data sources. If you're still having problems,
try
converting your data source to an Excel file. Saved as a 2003 or 2007
version. It doesn't seem to matter.
I hope some of this helps those of you who are still experiencing this
frustrating problem.
"wg_tech" wrote:
we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to
a large
number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues
because we
are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct
to
others.
Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought
to
many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the
same
problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked.
So
there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and
other have
similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this
single task
machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session.
Any information is greatly appreciated.