[Jason.Bradley]

I work for one of the largest Public School Districts in the nation and in
our school system we have something like 14,000 employees total. Anyway, we
have various mailings that need to get sent out to all employees on an annual
basis. We used to use some old, complicated, antiquated method through
xerox, however now we are switching to Word's mail merge to make this process
more efficient and speedy. The only trouble is that Mail Merge crashes when
trying to import more than 10,001 records--which means the batches have to be
split up. Now I understand there is only so much memory to allocate and fit
the job into, however it would be nice to have this number doubled or even
tripled! as I can't imagine that I'm the only company with more than 10,000
employees that would benefit from this change.
Office 2003: Word 2003 v. 11.8106.8107 SP2

[Peter Jamieson]

I would report this to Microsoft (which you aren't really doing by posting
in these groups), because they do usually try to avoid fixed limits such as
this one.

As far as I can remember, there /is/ a limit of 10,000 records in the
Recipients list dialog box, and that limit can have an impact on some
operations, but when I've tested with /small/ records it has been possible
to go well aboive 10,000. So the limit may be a combination of record count
and record size.

Because of the kind of problem you describe, I wouldn't personally rely on
large merges working properly or quickly (although they might actually be
fine), and would tend to batch stuff up anyway so that any problems are
confined to relatively small numbers (especially if you're printing your
output and stand to lose a lot of paper if things go wrong). IMO with any
process such as this it's also essential to do some quality checking of the
output anyway.

If your data source allows it, it may be worth tryuing a different
connection method (check tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversion at open"
and re-connect tot see what's on offer). e.g. with Access and Excel, DDE,
OLEDB and ODBC are all on offer, though each has its limitaitons, and with
SQL Server (and probably Oracle) you can use OLEDB or ODBC. The main
disadvanatge of using ODBC is that MS hasn't updated their drivers to pass
Unicode characters through (or maybe the limitation is somewhere other than
the driver - I don't know).

Peter Jamieson

"Jason.Bradley" wrote in message
...
I work for one of the largest Public School Districts in the nation and in
our school system we have something like 14,000 employees total. Anyway,
we
have various mailings that need to get sent out to all employees on an
annual
basis. We used to use some old, complicated, antiquated method through
xerox, however now we are switching to Word's mail merge to make this
process
more efficient and speedy. The only trouble is that Mail Merge crashes
when
trying to import more than 10,001 records--which means the batches have to
be
split up. Now I understand there is only so much memory to allocate and
fit
the job into, however it would be nice to have this number doubled or even
tripled! as I can't imagine that I'm the only company with more than
10,000
employees that would benefit from this change.
Office 2003: Word 2003 v. 11.8106.8107 SP2