I have search the net and tried the "solutions" from Microsoft. No
luck. Here is the situation.

I use Office 2000. I had a form letter and an envelope generator with
an Access table and it has worked fine for a couple of months. Just
today the records in the Access table seemed to get out of order. I
created a query sorting by a date field and then inserted a number
field. I select based upon the number field.

Well, now I cannot establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Access.
There are no quotes in the table name. I am not selecting on an image.
Everything is as it was.

To test this (after a couple of reboots), I created a minimal Access
table (two fields, one entry). I then tried with a new word document
to do a merge. No luck there either. It seems that there is something
drastically wrong in the Access-Word connection.

As a temporary work-around, I selected all the records from the table
and pasted them into an Excel spreadsheet and changed the datasource in
the letter and envelope to this Excel document. That works fine.

Can someone tell me how to fix the basic problem?

Shelly

Doesn't anyone have a suggestion?

Hi Sheldon

Well, DDE connections are finicky things. Have you installed anything,
even updates, on your system since the last time you were able to merge
successfully?

There is a checkbox in Access Tools/Options/General (I think that's the
tab) to "Ignore DDE commands", you could see if that has somehow gotten
activated. And make sure you don't have any queries or VBA projects in
"Design" mode.

Other than that, the only thing I can suggest to get you up and running
(that would be faster than the Excel copy/paste) would be to use an ODBC
connection. Activate the "Select method" checkbox in the Open data source
dialog box. After you select the mdb file you'll get a list of valid
connection methods, where you can choose ODBC. In the next dialog box,
use Options/Views to get the queries in the list of tables (they'll be
added at the bottom of the list).

This is generally quite a bit faster than DDE, but it can't work with
parameter queries, or queries that contain user-defined VBA functions.

I have search the net and tried the "solutions" from Microsoft. No
luck. Here is the situation.

I use Office 2000. I had a form letter and an envelope generator with
an Access table and it has worked fine for a couple of months. Just
today the records in the Access table seemed to get out of order. I
created a query sorting by a date field and then inserted a number
field. I select based upon the number field.

Well, now I cannot establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Access.
There are no quotes in the table name. I am not selecting on an image.
Everything is as it was.

To test this (after a couple of reboots), I created a minimal Access
table (two fields, one entry). I then tried with a new word document
to do a merge. No luck there either. It seems that there is something
drastically wrong in the Access-Word connection.

As a temporary work-around, I selected all the records from the table
and pasted them into an Excel spreadsheet and changed the datasource in
the letter and envelope to this Excel document. That works fine.

Can someone tell me how to fix the basic problem?


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

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reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

Thank you for responding.

There have been no updates at all. It worked, and then in the same
session, 2 minutes later, it stopped working.

The checkbox is unchecked.

I have no queries (I deleted the one I created) nor VBA projects. It
is a simple table and that is all.

I'll try ODBC.

Shelly