I have about 15,000 rows in an Excel 2002 file and wish to import into Word
2002 but need to keep the Excel formatting. Last year I followed the advice
to override the OLEDB with DDE and worked fine except I had to reduce the
number of rows to about 500 thereby creating about 30 files (30x500=15000).
This was the only way I could overcome the above error and get the merge to
work. However this year after adding some new columns to my Excel file, it
is not working and I suspect the amount of data being handled is too large.
I reduced the number of rows to 200 and still does not work. Do I need to
reduce it further yet ?

Does anyone know how I can mail merge the data from Excel into Word, keep
the Excel formatting, and do so without creating hundreds of separate files
? Thanks !

If you have a field that contains a lot of duplicated values, for example
State, or Department, or some such data type, you could consider importing
into a single Access table, and doing the merge from a parameter query.
For example in the case of a state field, you could merge for NJ, the VA,
then CA, etc. Or perhaps Access to Word merge would function a bit better
when using DDE with a large data set.

"Rick Stahl" wrote:

I have about 15,000 rows in an Excel 2002 file and wish to import into Word
2002 but need to keep the Excel formatting. Last year I followed the advice
to override the OLEDB with DDE and worked fine except I had to reduce the
number of rows to about 500 thereby creating about 30 files (30x500=15000).
This was the only way I could overcome the above error and get the merge to
work. However this year after adding some new columns to my Excel file, it
is not working and I suspect the amount of data being handled is too large.
I reduced the number of rows to 200 and still does not work. Do I need to
reduce it further yet ?

Does anyone know how I can mail merge the data from Excel into Word, keep
the Excel formatting, and do so without creating hundreds of separate files
? Thanks !

Hi Rick,

I have about 15,000 rows in an Excel 2002 file and wish to import into Word
2002 but need to keep the Excel formatting. Last year I followed the advice
to override the OLEDB with DDE and worked fine except I had to reduce the
number of rows to about 500 thereby creating about 30 files (30x500=15000).
This was the only way I could overcome the above error and get the merge to
work. However this year after adding some new columns to my Excel file, it
is not working and I suspect the amount of data being handled is too large.
I reduced the number of rows to 200 and still does not work. Do I need to
reduce it further yet ?

I'd say about the only way you can determine this would be to test (reduce to
like two or three rows and see if that works). How many columns did you add to
this data source / how many do you have total? What data type is the content of
these new columns, or do they contain especially long strings of text?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)