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Edit Recipients dialog box - data shifted/scrambled
Hello,
I am working on a Word 2002 mail merge, with an Excel 2002 worksheet as the datasource. (Using Windows XP Professional operating system.) The data that we are previewing and attempting to filter in the Edit Recipients Dialog Box has shifted on some records, i.e. in the Last Name column, it shows some last names, but some first names. On those where it shows the first names, the entire row of data has shifted one column to the left, in effect scrambling all of our data, and making the filters ineffective. (The excel sheet remains correct and unchanged, no data has actually shifted in the data source, only in the edit recipients dialog box view.) BACKGROUND Last week the merge worked properly, but this week we are having troubles with it. After opening the merge letter, we use the mail merge toolbar to attach the data source, and then open the mail merge recipients dialog box. In the past, we have used the filters to select all records with "SEND LETTER" as the criteria in a certain column. We have two "comments" columns in the Excel sheet that come before the "Last Name" and "First Name" columns. We have found that the data shifts only on those records where the first "Internal Comments" column has been left blank. As a test, we typed test data into the internal comments cell for each record, and this seems to have "fixed" our issue for now. However, we do not want to keep this unneeded info in those cells, and would rather leave them blank if no comments have been made. (In case it helps, we are using the add-in from Graham's site to merge to individual documents. Also, in the Internal Comments cells we have used the "Alt+Enter" command to force a new line entry in the same cell. Not sure if either of these has a bearing on the issue.) We use mail merge extensively, and have never had this issue before... it has me stumped. We use these excel and word documents as templates for many programs that we coordinate, and would very much like to resolve the issue in the master templates if possible. Has anyone else ever had an issue similiar to this? Or does anyone have any suggestions as to why the sudden shift in our data and how to resolve it? Thanks! Cara |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Edit Recipients dialog box - data shifted/scrambled
I have tried to reproduce this (although so far I have only been able to use
Word/Excel 2003, not 2002), but have not been able to do so. I think it has been mentioned before, but in some cases the problem may have been to do with quote characters in the data, which doesn't seem to be the case here. Two rather obvious suggestions, assuming it's occurring on more than one system: a. are you using automatic updates from MS? If so, are you in a position to restore your system to a point where everything worked, then work forward and identify which update seems to have caused the problem? If it's impossible to skip that particular update (and longer term, it usually is in my experience) then I don't think you have much option but to work around the problem in the way you already do, or contact MS Technical Support directly. b. have you tried recreating your Workbook from scratch? I suppose you can also try changing the connection method to DDE or ODBC, even if it's just to see if the problem still occurs. Peter Jamieson "C. Cunningham" wrote in message ... Hello, I am working on a Word 2002 mail merge, with an Excel 2002 worksheet as the datasource. (Using Windows XP Professional operating system.) The data that we are previewing and attempting to filter in the Edit Recipients Dialog Box has shifted on some records, i.e. in the Last Name column, it shows some last names, but some first names. On those where it shows the first names, the entire row of data has shifted one column to the left, in effect scrambling all of our data, and making the filters ineffective. (The excel sheet remains correct and unchanged, no data has actually shifted in the data source, only in the edit recipients dialog box view.) BACKGROUND Last week the merge worked properly, but this week we are having troubles with it. After opening the merge letter, we use the mail merge toolbar to attach the data source, and then open the mail merge recipients dialog box. In the past, we have used the filters to select all records with "SEND LETTER" as the criteria in a certain column. We have two "comments" columns in the Excel sheet that come before the "Last Name" and "First Name" columns. We have found that the data shifts only on those records where the first "Internal Comments" column has been left blank. As a test, we typed test data into the internal comments cell for each record, and this seems to have "fixed" our issue for now. However, we do not want to keep this unneeded info in those cells, and would rather leave them blank if no comments have been made. (In case it helps, we are using the add-in from Graham's site to merge to individual documents. Also, in the Internal Comments cells we have used the "Alt+Enter" command to force a new line entry in the same cell. Not sure if either of these has a bearing on the issue.) We use mail merge extensively, and have never had this issue before... it has me stumped. We use these excel and word documents as templates for many programs that we coordinate, and would very much like to resolve the issue in the master templates if possible. Has anyone else ever had an issue similiar to this? Or does anyone have any suggestions as to why the sudden shift in our data and how to resolve it? Thanks! Cara |
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