Understood.
If you are in a position to use VBA then the business of connecting using
DDE can be made easier, especially if the users are not allowed to make
ad-hoc connections. The users have to have Excel on their machines, and you
won't see Unicode characters that aren't in the ANSI set.
In essence, you need a bit of code such as the following:
Sub ConnectToXLwithDDE()
ActiveDocument.MailMerge.OpenDataSource _
Name:="the full path name of the Excel workbook", _
Connection:="Entire Spreadsheet", _
Subtype:=wdMergeSubTypeWord2000
End Sub
If you need to let your users choose the workbook, it can be done in a
rather crude way with a couple of extra lines of code.
Once the connection is made and the mail merge main document saved, the
connection should be restored on re-open (except the users have to respond
to that SQL question).
Peter Jamieson
"LabrGuy Bob R" wrote in message
news
Peter thank you for your response, but it appears none of those ideas
would ultimately solve my prolem. I have about 20 different people that
are going to have to use this database with varying skill levels.and they
would be overwhelmed. I'm going to post another question in here about a
different subject but still related to the merging and some code that some
kind people gave me. Possibly you can help me out with that.
THanks
Bob
"Peter Jamieson" wrote in message
...
For an explanation and some suggestions see
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk/t0003.htm
In this case you probably need to use the DDE option described there.
Peter Jamieson
"LabrGuy Bob R" wrote in message
.. .
Good Day,
I have a Excel Spreadsheet as my data source and am running Excel and
Word 2003 along with windows XP
I have numerous fields in the Excel and they are formatted in various
sytles; Currency, General, Numbers, telelphone numbers, dates and times.
My problem: Most of the data transfers fine into my merge WORD document
but quit a bit will show up with a "0" in the merged field instead of
the actual data. The data will display fine in the excel spreadsheet,
but not on the view merge info button. It's different than when I have a
blank because that shows up as blank.
I have tried restarting the WORD document removing and reinstalling the
actual merge field etc.
The switches on the numbers, dates etc are plugged into the formatting
of the field like all the help files say, and while they will format the
results of the fields that show different than 0, thats all I get from
them as they can't do it with the 0 cells.
any ideas
Bob R