[BeetleB]

At home, I am working on an XP operating system with Work and Excel versions.
Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office Word 2003. I have SP2.


I encountered a problem last evening. I keep the mailing information of an
organization of over 500 members. The database for the org is an Excel
spreadsheet. Since 2006, I have been using Mail Merge in Word to generate
mail labels for the month mailings. All has worked very well. Last night,
I browsed in the merge steps to find my workbook. I opened it. The
spreadsheet named MEPN appeared along with a spreadsheet MEPN_ which does not
exist in the workbook. (It turns out that last month, I used filtering in
Excel to get some special lists. ) When I selected, the spreadsheet MEPN as
I would normally do, I was met with an emtpy Tables screen --- instead of
the usual possibility to filter the MEPN worksheet items. Pressing OK, the
message said that my table (presumably MEPN) could not be opened.

Does using Excel filtering disable my use of Mail Merge? Does it corrupt
the spreadsheet for use in Mail Merge? I worked with the spreadsheet ---
turning on and off the filtering in Excel and got the same results in Mail
Merge. I even copied the worksheet to another new workbook and got similar
results. The table could not be opened. What I believe does work as a
workaround is to copy the content and paste it in a new workbook. Then I use
that new workbook with Mail Merge. Is there anyway to redeem my original
worksheet so that I nullify the results of the filtering? I have done some
searching. Is this problem discussed somewhere on the Web?

Thanks.

BettleB