[Steve DB]

I have a letter that was developed in Word 97 that is Mail Merged to an
Excel 97 database. The letter is shared with about 20 employees.
Recentley, two employees got Office 2003 installed on their PCs and the Mail
Merge no longer works correctly. They can no longer use the "Find Record"
button to get the record they need.

I figure it must be a compatibility issue with the Word versions. But, is
there any way around this?

Thanks,

Steve

[Cindy M.]

Hi Steve,

I have a letter that was developed in Word 97 that is Mail Merged to an
Excel 97 database. The letter is shared with about 20 employees.
Recentley, two employees got Office 2003 installed on their PCs and the Mail
Merge no longer works correctly. They can no longer use the "Find Record"
button to get the record they need.

I figure it must be a compatibility issue with the Word versions. But, is
there any way around this?

For some background, please see
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/265374/en-us and
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168729/EN-US/

If Find Record is working correctly in Word 97, then it could be due to the
above hotfix OR you could have a macro that corrects the problem by doing an
"invalid" search to release the "lock" a successful find creates.

The problem is, Microsoft changed FindRecord in Word 2002/2003 so that it now
works correctly for the user. But it's been broken for working with macros. So
if you have carried a macro solution forward to the new version of Word, it
will fail.

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

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