Thanks for the reply. Do you know of some good documentation to get me
started on this?

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

I was thinking of doing some
sort of query in Access to combine the data from the spreadsheets into a
single table and then to use that for my email merge. Thoughts?

You can certainly get data into Access in a number of ways (link to an Excel
table, import data from an excel table, write a query that explicitly
queries the table) and I would certainly give it a try if the real source of
the problem does not become apparent.

Peter Jamieson

"Mike C." wrote in message
news
Peter - Thanks for the troubleshooting. Good points to check. No, none
of
those are the case, though. I'm in Office 2003 and am using the default
settings.

Also, I was wondering if this might go smoother if my data were in a
single
location, specifically, in an Access table. I was thinking of doing some
sort of query in Access to combine the data from the spreadsheets into a
single table and then to use that for my email merge. Thoughts?

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

here could be more than one problem here, but do you have either of the
spreadsheets open twice at the same time - e.g. do you ever have two Mail
Merge Main documents, connected to the same Excel sheet, open at the same
time, or one Mail Merge main document and the sheet also open in Excel?
If
so, you may find that only opening each sheet in one way at a time may
help.

Also, which version of Office, and are you selecting a particular
connection
method or using Word's default.

Peter Jamieson
"Mike C." Mike wrote in message
...
I have several Word documents that I use as main documents for email
merges.
The merged data and email addresses come from two spreadsheets (not
simultaniously). I need to use the merge documents several times each
day,
so I'd like to be able to create each one once and then re-use them
from
there on out.

The problem is that now that I have each document created, they only
work
right part of the time and I haven't been able to identify the cause of
what
seems to be intermittant data errors. Sometimes, when I open one of
the
merged documents, I get an error message saying "This operation cannot
be
completed because of dialog or database engine failures. Please try
again
later". I click OK. Then, I'm presented with a message saying "Word
cannot
find its data source...", so I click "Find Data Source...", which works
for
finding the data source, but then I have to re-define the recipient
criteria,
which takes up even more time. I save the document, in hopes that it
will
retain the data, which it does for a while, but after I open and use
another
merge document, the first one stops working and I have to set it up
again!
So annoying. Any ideas on how to fix this would really be appreciated.

Thanks!
Mike C.