[Mark Tangard]

On the PC a friend of mine uses, after any Mail Merge completes, two
annoying things happen consistently. First, the merged document freezes
-- you can’t click in it or open any menus. The only thing that seem to
free this up is to task-switch to another window and back. What’s wrong?

Second, even when both the merged doc and the mailing list (an Excel
file) have been properly & manually closed, Excel still shows up in the
Task Manager’s progam list as active. Results: Opening Excel doesn’t
work (generic error beep & that’s all); and the top-level menu (add-in)
that I built for him no longer appears.

And this continues this way until he either reboots or clicks “End
Process” (ignoring the scary warning).

What would cause that?

Word 2003, WinXP

Mark Tangard

[Cindy M.]

Hi Mark,

On the PC a friend of mine uses, after any Mail Merge completes, two
annoying things happen consistently. First, the merged document freezes
-- you can’t click in it or open any menus. The only thing that seem to
free this up is to task-switch to another window and back. What’s wrong?

Second, even when both the merged doc and the mailing list (an Excel
file) have been properly & manually closed, Excel still shows up in the
Task Manager’s progam list as active. Results: Opening Excel doesn’t
work (generic error beep & that’s all); and the top-level menu (add-in)
that I built for him no longer appears.

And this continues this way until he either reboots or clicks “End
Process” (ignoring the scary warning).

What would cause that?

Word 2003, WinXP

No idea about the first, beyond the usual suspects (damaged Normal.dot or
damaged document, a third-party add-in interfering, etc.)

The second came up a few months ago in the German-speaking newsgroups. As I
recall, it's a specific combination of how you link Word to the data source
PLUS the order in which you open the Word document and the Excel workbook.
If you do it in just the right way, Excel is locked open.

I don't suppose you can read German? Here's a link to a long discussion
that brought the underlying behavior to light (more or less):

http://groups.google.ch/group/micros..._frm/thread/a8
1e69678f704719/816b20f76697610e?hl=de#816b20f76697610e

Thomas Ramel (Swiss Excel MVP) has the best understanding of how this all
works together.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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