Jennifer-
Thanks for that bit of feedback - I'll have a look at some point. I don't
actually use Excel a lot but have encountered another oddity with text
wrapping a few years ago.
Partly because Excel's DDE support has not been maintained in new versions
of Excel, it is likely that a number of Excel features will cause problems
with DDE. A simple example is that DDE can only see one sheet in a workbook.
However, as you say it cannot be wrapping on its own, because it used to
work (unless there has been a recent change in this area).
Peter Jamieson
"jenniclair via OfficeKB.com" u25634@uwe wrote in message
news:6595da328d07f@uwe...
**** UPDATE ****
In case anyone's interested....
After following Peter's advice re saving as .csv and then saving that as
an
excel doc, I got the database working. I then sat and put my formatting
back
in - nothing drastic, just column widths, some colours on some cells and a
couple of basic formulae. I then found that the problem had occurred
again,
namely that when I tried to open the word doc to mail merge, I got the
error
message that the DDE connection could not be re-established, so had to
open
using the converter method, which meant that the majority of potential
merge
fields were missing from the drop down menu.
I went through the whole process again - save as .csv, save that as
excel -
and again, got a working database. Put some formatting in and it stopped
working. By a process of elimination, I have discovered that it is the
"wrap" function that seems to cause the problem. I always wrap text in
cells,
so that I don't have to have the columns so wide (shrinking to fit makes
the
cell contents too small to read) but as soon as I wrap, the DDE stops
working.
I have no idea why this is, as it has always worked in the past but it
very
definitely does seem to be this. As soon as I take the wrap off, I can
merge
to the database without any problems!
This means that I now have to either have very wide columns or shrink to
fit,
neither of which is ideal, or I have to remember to take the wrap off
before
I try to merge to the database. Not a major problem but an irritation,
nonetheless!!
If anyone else encounters a similar problem, it may be worth just taking
off
the wrap and seeing if this resolves the issue for you too!
My thanks again for the assistance.
Jennifer.
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