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#1
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How can a MERGEFIELD be longer than 255 characters?
Conducting a mail merge in Word, but as well as address/name/email/greeting,
i want one mergefield to be an entire paragraph - making it longer than 255 characters. How can I make Word bring in a piece of merged data that is longer than this? Thank you for your help! James |
#2
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How can a MERGEFIELD be longer than 255 characters?
I've now looked round all the discussion forums here, noting that its a
common problem, and noting the common fixes. Just to let you know what I've tried in vain: 1) Ticking 'Confirm Conversion at Open' seems to have no effect to anything - when I open the document I get no confirmation alert or option screen.. am I supposed to? 2) Padding out the first row in my Excel sheet with 400character paragraphs does nothing to aid the truncation - when viewing that record 6 out of 12 fields show 255 out of the 400 characters of the paragraph, and the other 6 show nothing. The second record is still truncated. 3) Setting TypeGuessRows in the Jet registry entries to 0, in order to get Excel to look at all the rows does nothing, and when I make 50 rows brimmed with 400character paragraphs, it still does nothing. So... what should I do??! Thanks, James |
#3
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How can a MERGEFIELD be longer than 255 characters?
This limit on character count depends on a number of things including the
type of connection you make, so you may be able to do what you need by changing that. However, if you want to get away from arbitrary limitations in the data source, you could put your texts in a Word file, bookmark each one with a different name (e.g. "text1", "text2" etc.), and put the bookmark name in your data source instead, e.g. in a field called "Mytext". Then use a nested field such as { INCLUDETEXT "c:\\mergedocs\\mytexts.doc" "{ MERGEFIELD mytext }" } where all the {} are the sort of special field braces you can insert using ctrl-F9. You can do something similar using AUTOTEXTs. Peter Jamieson "borrodell" wrote in message ... Conducting a mail merge in Word, but as well as address/name/email/greeting, i want one mergefield to be an entire paragraph - making it longer than 255 characters. How can I make Word bring in a piece of merged data that is longer than this? Thank you for your help! James |
#4
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How can a MERGEFIELD be longer than 255 characters?
1) Ticking 'Confirm Conversion at Open' seems to have no effect to
anything - when I open the document I get no confirmation alert or option screen.. am I supposed to? You have to go through the process of connecting to your data source again. After you have selected the data source (and pressed OK/Open/whatever) there should be an additional dialog that lets you specify a particular connection method. What's in there depends on the type of file you are trying to open. I'd go through that route before looking at the other approaches. FWIW I find it astonishing and irritating that this kind of limitation not only still exists, but has actually been introduced in the last 5-10 years. Peter Jamieson "borrodell" wrote in message ... I've now looked round all the discussion forums here, noting that its a common problem, and noting the common fixes. Just to let you know what I've tried in vain: 1) Ticking 'Confirm Conversion at Open' seems to have no effect to anything - when I open the document I get no confirmation alert or option screen.. am I supposed to? 2) Padding out the first row in my Excel sheet with 400character paragraphs does nothing to aid the truncation - when viewing that record 6 out of 12 fields show 255 out of the 400 characters of the paragraph, and the other 6 show nothing. The second record is still truncated. 3) Setting TypeGuessRows in the Jet registry entries to 0, in order to get Excel to look at all the rows does nothing, and when I make 50 rows brimmed with 400character paragraphs, it still does nothing. So... what should I do??! Thanks, James |
#5
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How can a MERGEFIELD be longer than 255 characters?
Thanks Peter - I think changing the connection is key, I'm going to try that
out this afternoon. The paragraphs being imported into word from excel are being collaborated on along with the other fields, so I need it all in one document - otherwise your suggestion for seperate text files would work well. Thank you for the idea! James |
#6
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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How can a MERGEFIELD be longer than 255 characters?
Another thing you can consider if the column count is small (up to Word's
maximum) is simply to Select the entire sheet in Excel, then cut and paste into Word, and use that as the data source. Not good for ease of use, but if it is good enough for you, it should at least be automatable. Peter Jamieson "borrodell" wrote in message ... Thanks Peter - I think changing the connection is key, I'm going to try that out this afternoon. The paragraphs being imported into word from excel are being collaborated on along with the other fields, so I need it all in one document - otherwise your suggestion for seperate text files would work well. Thank you for the idea! James |
#7
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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How can a MERGEFIELD be longer than 255 characters?
Did it! I didn't realise that 'connecting at open' meant opening the data
source rather than the word document - so once i started from scratch it offered me the option of DDE.. which i took.. to my immense pleasure it now works! Thank you James |
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