Thank you, Peter, much appreciated. I'll jettison Excel and just use a .csv
or .txt file.
Toward that end, I've run into another problem. It may be a bit off subject
for this forum as it's one step back in the process, but if you could point
me in the right direction, I appreciate it.
Here's the bigger pictu My clients send me a large amount of information
which I then use to create promotional items for them. I'm trying to create
forms they can fill in that I can then extract the data from into a .txt or
..csv file; which will, in turn, be the source file for for the various merged
fields in the templated documents which I then re-write/edit.
Forgive me for asking an elementary question, but I just upgraded to 2007
and after scouring "Help," can still find nothing that tells me how to
extract data from a filled-in form and send it into a .txt/.csv file?
If you have any clues, I'd be greatly appreciative.
"Peter Jamieson" wrote:
First of all, you cannot use more than 255 columns in an Excel sheet as the
data source for a merge, no matter how you connect to the sheet - even with
Excel 2007, which allows a whole lot more columns per sheet. So if your
column count is set to go up, using Excel as a data source is not going to
work longer term unless you can extract the columns you need /before/ the
merge. Some connection methods may not even let you use 255. As far as I
know, the only data sources that can actually use more than 255 are
delimited text files that Word opens using its internal or external "text
converters" (i.e. because Word tries to open plain text files using an OLE
DB provider in the first instance, you may have to find a way to force it to
use a text converter instead, e.g. open the .csv in Word and save it as a
..doc format file)
Secondly, I have personally encountered limits in the number of columns Word
"sees", but these limits do not appear to be fixed - e.g. as far as I know
in Word 2007 there is no fixed limit in the drop-down of 100 or even 127 or
128. However, there might be such a limit for one of the connection methods
(DDE, say). There are also limits in the number of coulmns, rows and amount
of data that the mail merge recipients dialog box can show, for example.
Generally speaking I have found that if Word does not list a field in its
drop-down it's because it is not "seeing" that field. However, you can
verify that that is or is not the case by inserting the appropriate merge
field manually and seeing if Word populates it - e.g. suppose the last
column in your sheet is called mylastcoulumn, insert the field
{ MERGEFIELD mylastfield }
in your document and see if Word populates it during preview (and during a
merge, preferably). If Word doesn't recognise it, it's not just a dropdown
display problem.
Other things might conceivably cause this problem, e.g. if you have a column
with a blank name and data somewhere after 100 columns or so.
--
Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
"RatherBeAtTheBeach" wrote in
message ...
I want to use an excel spreadsheet with approx 250+ columns as the source
file ("recipient list") for a Word merge doc. However, the "Insert Merge
Field" drop-down menu only lists the first 100 or so entries (column
headings).
I'd just type a list, but I'll need to use repeatedly use that spreadsheet
(converted from downloaded .csv files) when I do the actual merges. Help!
How
do I get it to recognize all the fields?
Thanks