I am doing the same thing and have encountered this problem. I find that when
my input (Excel) file does not contain headers, the merge works just
fine....fields of more than 255 characters display correctly. As soon as I
add a header row to the input file, fields longer than 255 characters are
truncated. It sure would be nice to be able to use the column headers in the
mail merge template (as they are descriptive and multiple people will be
using the template).

Have you learned anything else since you posted this question?

Thanks

"martinenatasha" wrote:

I am using the mail merge function to merge a large amount of data from an
Excel 2003 spreadsheet into a Word 2003 document.

It appears as though any Excel field which exceeds 255 characters gets cut
off at exactly the 255 character limit mark in the merging process.

How can I work around this problem? Perhaps it can be done through macros?