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#1
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Excel spreadsheet blank in merge
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 |
#2
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Excel spreadsheet blank in merge
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 |
#3
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Excel spreadsheet blank in merge
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 |
#4
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Excel spreadsheet blank in merge
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 |
#5
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Excel spreadsheet blank in merge
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 |
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