The cell in my data source file (excel) contains a nonbreaking space symbol,
but on merging (DDE) it is replaced with an ordinary space symbol. Is there
any way to retain the original symbol (nonbreaking space)?

Not easily. Your best bet (and I haven't tried this particular thing) is to
try to convert your Excel table into a Word table (e.g. use Edit|Copy in
Excel then Edit|Copy in an empty Word document). At that point you should be
able to see if the non-breaking spaces have been retained. If so, then you
may be able to retain them in a merge (if necessary - perhaps cut/paste into
Word is all you need) by using a trick in your Mail Merge Main document -
normally, to merge a column named "xyz" in the data source, you need a {
MERGEFIELD xyz } field, but if the data source is a Word document, you can
sometimes get away with using a { REF xyz } field or just { xyz }, and if
that works, the formatting applied to the original text is normally
retained.

Peter Jamieson


"George Lagger" wrote in message
...
The cell in my data source file (excel) contains a nonbreaking space
symbol,
but on merging (DDE) it is replaced with an ordinary space symbol. Is
there
any way to retain the original symbol (nonbreaking space)?

Perhaps you also should complain to MS. The non-breaking space is defined in all
the relevant encodings (MS code page 1252, ISO8859-1, Unicode), so there's
really no reason why Office should mess with it.

Greetings,
Klaus

Yes, it's interesting that these characters, and leading/trailing spaces
survive if you get the data via an ADO Recordset, which suggests that
a. OLEDB passes them through
b. they are are stripped/transformed somewhere in Word's
Mailmerge.DataSource object

Peter Jamieson
"Klaus Linke" wrote in message
...
Perhaps you also should complain to MS. The non-breaking space is defined
in all
the relevant encodings (MS code page 1252, ISO8859-1, Unicode), so there's
really no reason why Office should mess with it.

Greetings,
Klaus