[Janette]

I am using office 2003. When selecting the data source - Excel spreadsheet,
the Excel sheet is blank when doing the merge. I have headers in the first
row - everything appears to be the same as always. Any ideas?--
Janette

[Peter Jamieson]

Just a guess: if you look at the row numbers on the left of the spreadsheet,
your column headings are presumably in row 1, but is the next row number you
see "row 3"? If so, maybe you inadvertently inserted a row and hid it
(easily done:-))

If not that and the sheet is simple (no formulas) I suggest you export to
..csv format, import to a new .xls and try connecting to that.

Peter Jamieson

"Janette" wrote in message
...
I am using office 2003. When selecting the data source - Excel
spreadsheet,
the Excel sheet is blank when doing the merge. I have headers in the first
row - everything appears to be the same as always. Any ideas?--
Janette

[Bravos]

I have a similar problem.
This is my first use of mail merge and yesterday I got everything merging
without difficulty before realising I had messed up my data source.

Now I have sorted out the Excel spreadsheet and set up the mail merge again
and find that a 'Serial nbr' field and the postcode both merge as a '0' -
although there is data in the field in the Excel spreadsheet data source.
This was happening on the previous attempt with the serial nbr but not the
postcode.

The data may be variable i.e. the serial number is sometimes numeric and
sometimes general format. Similarly, the postcode format may change and
there is not always data in the field.

Would these variables affect the output?

Or is there some other reason?

Regards

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

This is from a response by Peter Jamieson to another post that probably
explains and suggests a solution (DDE) to your problem:

Quote

Your best short-term bet, assuming you have Excel on your system, do not
have non-ANSI Unicode characters in your Excel sheet, and have the data in
the first sheet of your workbook (and probably other stuff as well...), is
to try changing the way Word gets your data to the old method (DDE): check
Word Tools|Options|general|"Confirm conversion at Open", go through the
connection process again, and select the DDE method in the additional dialog
box.

Assuming you are using Word 2002/2003, the problem is that the OLEDB
provider that Word uses to get data from Excel tries to determine a data
type for each column. It looks in the first 8 or 25 rows and uses the data
type it finds for the rest of the column. When the types are mixed, it takes
the "majority type". The trouble is that it regards text less than 256
characters long as "text" type and longer ones as "memo" type, and there are
also additional special rules when dealing with texts and memos. You /might/
find, for example, that by adding enough trailing space to shorter texts in
the same column, the whole thing springs to life again.

I'd point you to the web pages I'm writing on this but there are so many ifs
and buts that it's taking me forever to complete.

Peter Jamieson

Unquote

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

"Bravos" wrote in message
...
I have a similar problem.
This is my first use of mail merge and yesterday I got everything merging
without difficulty before realising I had messed up my data source.

Now I have sorted out the Excel spreadsheet and set up the mail merge
again
and find that a 'Serial nbr' field and the postcode both merge as a '0' -
although there is data in the field in the Excel spreadsheet data source.
This was happening on the previous attempt with the serial nbr but not the
postcode.

The data may be variable i.e. the serial number is sometimes numeric and
sometimes general format. Similarly, the postcode format may change and
there is not always data in the field.

Would these variables affect the output?

Or is there some other reason?

Regards

[Bravos]

Thank you, problem solved.
I stripped the letter prefix off the serial number into an adjacent column
and made the serial number column all numeric.
This not only resolved the serial number problem but also the postcode -
although I did nothing to the postcode format.

Obviously a black art!

Many thanks.


"Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote:

This is from a response by Peter Jamieson to another post that probably
explains and suggests a solution (DDE) to your problem:

Quote

Your best short-term bet, assuming you have Excel on your system, do not
have non-ANSI Unicode characters in your Excel sheet, and have the data in
the first sheet of your workbook (and probably other stuff as well...), is
to try changing the way Word gets your data to the old method (DDE): check
Word Tools|Options|general|"Confirm conversion at Open", go through the
connection process again, and select the DDE method in the additional dialog
box.

Assuming you are using Word 2002/2003, the problem is that the OLEDB
provider that Word uses to get data from Excel tries to determine a data
type for each column. It looks in the first 8 or 25 rows and uses the data
type it finds for the rest of the column. When the types are mixed, it takes
the "majority type". The trouble is that it regards text less than 256
characters long as "text" type and longer ones as "memo" type, and there are
also additional special rules when dealing with texts and memos. You /might/
find, for example, that by adding enough trailing space to shorter texts in
the same column, the whole thing springs to life again.

I'd point you to the web pages I'm writing on this but there are so many ifs
and buts that it's taking me forever to complete.

Peter Jamieson

Unquote

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

"Bravos" wrote in message
...
I have a similar problem.
This is my first use of mail merge and yesterday I got everything merging
without difficulty before realising I had messed up my data source.

Now I have sorted out the Excel spreadsheet and set up the mail merge
again
and find that a 'Serial nbr' field and the postcode both merge as a '0' -
although there is data in the field in the Excel spreadsheet data source.
This was happening on the previous attempt with the serial nbr but not the
postcode.

The data may be variable i.e. the serial number is sometimes numeric and
sometimes general format. Similarly, the postcode format may change and
there is not always data in the field.

Would these variables affect the output?

Or is there some other reason?

Regards