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#1
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large
number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#2
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
If your copy/copies of Office are still within the free support period, I
strongly recommend that you contact Microsoft support via the support pages on their website: a. the people here are basically just volunteers who do not work for Microsoft b. I doubt if anyone has any ideas other than the rather general ones you have probably already come across c. there have always been reports of merges hanging after so many records. In the general case, a memory leak is the obvious likely cause, especially when the merge is not to printer or an output document (where the problem could be related to the size of the output). However, in this case I suppose we also have to suspect timing issues between Word and your e-mail client, or Word and MAPI . I suppose capacity (e.g. of your e-mail client's message store) could also still be a problem but the random nature of the problem suggests otherwise. The only suggestions I can make are that if you are in a position to experiment without annoying large numbers of people, you could try a. using a different e-mail client (e.g. Outlook Express) if you are using SMTP to send (HTML e-mails not supported in that case) b. if you're using Outlook with Exchange Server, try simplyfying your Outlook setup and/or changing the way Outlook synchronises with Exchange Server. e.g. I would probably try to ensure that Outlook's attention is completely on the merge, e.g. it doesn't start trying to receive any records, doesn't start trying to autoarchive stuff in the middle of the merge) and I might try changing the way Outlook syncs. from "cached mode" (sorry, I can't remember the options off the top of my head) c. a "one merge per record" approach I can't give you a reference right now but if you search this group in Google Groups for Peter Jamieson activerecord you should find various macros for doing that kind of thing. My guess is that that appraoch will actually be worse but I suppose it is worth trying. Or try Doug Robbins' approach at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/...ttachments.htm -- Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk "wg_tech" wrote in message ... we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#3
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
wg_tech, did you ever get this answered? I've got the exact same anomaly.
) "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#4
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
I have the same problem and have not found a solutions yet. So any
suggestions are welcome "Paul Travis" wrote: wg_tech, did you ever get this answered? I've got the exact same anomaly. ) "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#5
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
Bump, I am having the same issue. I have been moving from machine to machine
within our office because it works fine the first couple of times then just stops. We use this feature on a monthlt basis and I am running out of machines. Anyone find a solution yet? "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#6
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
On Jan 22, 7:54*pm, Robert A.
wrote: Bump, I am having the same issue. I have been moving from machine to machine within our office because it works fine the first couple of times then just stops. We use this feature on a monthlt basis and I am running out of machines. Anyone find a solution yet? "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office2007, trying to do awordemailmergeto send to a large number ofemailaddresses. *We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-houseemailaddrs directly from exchange acct to others. Wordstopsresponding(hangs) during themerge, we originally thought to many forWordto handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. *Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. *So there is no real pattern to the hangs. *Have searched the web and other have similar issues. *We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated.- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - Bumping too, I have been having this issue for months and can not find a solution although I do know it is the connection to outlook that is causing it, once a machine stops responding to email nothing else will work with the email connection. Please help! |
#7
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
I am using now the pinpoint marketing tool and ... it works ! !
(www.pinpointtools.com) Mike "raremind" wrote: On Jan 22, 7:54 pm, Robert A. wrote: Bump, I am having the same issue. I have been moving from machine to machine within our office because it works fine the first couple of times then just stops. We use this feature on a monthlt basis and I am running out of machines. Anyone find a solution yet? "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office2007, trying to do awordemailmergeto send to a large number ofemailaddresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-houseemailaddrs directly from exchange acct to others. Wordstopsresponding(hangs) during themerge, we originally thought to many forWordto handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated.- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - Bumping too, I have been having this issue for months and can not find a solution although I do know it is the connection to outlook that is causing it, once a machine stops responding to email nothing else will work with the email connection. Please help! |
#8
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
Now why would I buy a package for 200 buck when the funtionality is free with
the office package? Keep your forum spam to yourself. Anybody have a real solution? "Mike Vandamme" wrote: I am using now the pinpoint marketing tool and ... it works ! ! (www.pinpointtools.com) Mike "raremind" wrote: On Jan 22, 7:54 pm, Robert A. wrote: Bump, I am having the same issue. I have been moving from machine to machine within our office because it works fine the first couple of times then just stops. We use this feature on a monthlt basis and I am running out of machines. Anyone find a solution yet? "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office2007, trying to do awordemailmergeto send to a large number ofemailaddresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-houseemailaddrs directly from exchange acct to others. Wordstopsresponding(hangs) during themerge, we originally thought to many forWordto handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated.- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - Bumping too, I have been having this issue for months and can not find a solution although I do know it is the connection to outlook that is causing it, once a machine stops responding to email nothing else will work with the email connection. Please help! |
#9
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
and I am running out of
machines. A couple of things it might be worth trying, either as diagnostics or as a workaround, although I expect you already have... a. run Office Diagnostics (e.g. in WOrd 2007 Office button|-Word options-resources) b. clear temp files c. if you have a machine you feel you can experiment with a bit more, use Windows Restore (in WinXP, or whatever it's called in Vista) to make a checkpoint, run the merge, then restore the machine d. if you happen to have something like VMWare, do (c) with a virtual machine but use VMWare's facilities to rollback to the pre-merge state. e. It might also be worth trying to delete/recreate any Outlook Profile post-merge. If anyone has any Word crash diagnostics (probably because they have had to crash Word rather than because this scenario causes a crash), let me know and I'll see what I can do with them. -- Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk "Robert A." wrote in message ... Bump, I am having the same issue. I have been moving from machine to machine within our office because it works fine the first couple of times then just stops. We use this feature on a monthlt basis and I am running out of machines. Anyone find a solution yet? "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#10
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
I've been having the exact same problem, and I've found that it isn't just
limited to Office 2007; I've seen the same behavior on a machine with Office 2003. I've researched this problem in depth 3 times now, including posting the issue here twice, and I haven't found even an inkling of reason as to how to resolve this problem. I goofed around with a few things that seem to help, but Word still hangs frequently whenever we try to send out a large mail merge. I'll post these tweaks below. I'm just glad to see that finally my company isn't the only one experiencing this problem. It's one of the most frustrating troubleshooting issues I've had to deal with. The problem happens so randomly that's near impossible to find any fix that works consistently. Using 2007, you start a mail merge (using the lovely ribbon now), select recipients (we always use an Excel file as the source), click Finish and Merge, type a subject, and send as HTML (sending as Plain Text is a whole other issue). Sometimes we'll get through thousands of e-mail without a problem, sometimes we won't get through 2 without crashing... again and again and again. I tried this on 3 different machines, one with Office 2007, one with Office 2003. Both experienced the same problem. I then tried a mail merge with a cleanly formatted machine with a fresh install of XP and Office 2007. Again, the EXACT same problem. Theres no rhyme or reason to it. I dont know whats causing the problem, only that, at one point, it was working beautifully, and at the next, PLOP. I suspect that Windows updates are the cause of this problem. We didnt make any other company-wide installs during this period when mail merge stopped working. So this leaves us users with the following options: 1) Wait for Microsoft to first of all acknowledge this as a problem, then release an update that will fix it. I'm not holding my breath for this one, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. or, 2) Use an alternative product. I toyed around with Open Office as they also have a mail merge feature, but I could never get it to work. However, I just came across the following add-on tool: Mail Merge Toolkit (http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/). This tool, among other things, says that it makes merging more "reliable in operation." I purchased one license for my company and so far it seems to be working. We sent out a mail merge with 10,000 recipients this afternoon and it didn't crash once; no way would we have had this kind of consistency using Word alone. Really it's rather ridiculous that we ended up having to pay to get this feature to work when we should have had it to begin with, but the Toolkit is relatively cheap and at this point I'll take it if it works. And its a miracle if it does. Weve been having this problem for months and Im at my wits end. I honestly recommend this tool to anyone whos experiencing this problem. Here are the tweaks I was using before I found this tool if anyone is interested and doesn't feel like shelling out any money for this problem: 1) Keep Outlook open and set it to Work Offline. Any interruptions such as Send/Receive attempts seems to bring about a crash. Disable your network connection if you have to. 2) Don't save the Word document you're using for the mail merge. Copy your e-mail text into a new document, DON'T SAVE IT, and execute the mail merge from there. Don't ask me why this affects anything, but it does. 3) If you're sending out a large number of e-mails (in the thousands), break your source file down into chunks of about 1000, maybe 2000 records. Also, I only ever used Excel as a source file, so I don't know how well this system works with other data sources. If you're still having problems, try converting your data source to an Excel file. Saved as a 2003 or 2007 version. It doesn't seem to matter. I hope some of this helps those of you who are still experiencing this frustrating problem. "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#11
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
Also, if anyone has come up with a solution that doesn't involve going with
an add-on or another product entirely, please post it. I'd love to see this problem resolved in a better way. "Bob" wrote: I've been having the exact same problem, and I've found that it isn't just limited to Office 2007; I've seen the same behavior on a machine with Office 2003. I've researched this problem in depth 3 times now, including posting the issue here twice, and I haven't found even an inkling of reason as to how to resolve this problem. I goofed around with a few things that seem to help, but Word still hangs frequently whenever we try to send out a large mail merge. I'll post these tweaks below. I'm just glad to see that finally my company isn't the only one experiencing this problem. It's one of the most frustrating troubleshooting issues I've had to deal with. The problem happens so randomly that's near impossible to find any fix that works consistently. Using 2007, you start a mail merge (using the lovely ribbon now), select recipients (we always use an Excel file as the source), click Finish and Merge, type a subject, and send as HTML (sending as Plain Text is a whole other issue). Sometimes we'll get through thousands of e-mail without a problem, sometimes we won't get through 2 without crashing... again and again and again. I tried this on 3 different machines, one with Office 2007, one with Office 2003. Both experienced the same problem. I then tried a mail merge with a cleanly formatted machine with a fresh install of XP and Office 2007. Again, the EXACT same problem. Theres no rhyme or reason to it. I dont know whats causing the problem, only that, at one point, it was working beautifully, and at the next, PLOP. I suspect that Windows updates are the cause of this problem. We didnt make any other company-wide installs during this period when mail merge stopped working. So this leaves us users with the following options: 1) Wait for Microsoft to first of all acknowledge this as a problem, then release an update that will fix it. I'm not holding my breath for this one, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. or, 2) Use an alternative product. I toyed around with Open Office as they also have a mail merge feature, but I could never get it to work. However, I just came across the following add-on tool: Mail Merge Toolkit (http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/). This tool, among other things, says that it makes merging more "reliable in operation." I purchased one license for my company and so far it seems to be working. We sent out a mail merge with 10,000 recipients this afternoon and it didn't crash once; no way would we have had this kind of consistency using Word alone. Really it's rather ridiculous that we ended up having to pay to get this feature to work when we should have had it to begin with, but the Toolkit is relatively cheap and at this point I'll take it if it works. And its a miracle if it does. Weve been having this problem for months and Im at my wits end. I honestly recommend this tool to anyone whos experiencing this problem. Here are the tweaks I was using before I found this tool if anyone is interested and doesn't feel like shelling out any money for this problem: 1) Keep Outlook open and set it to Work Offline. Any interruptions such as Send/Receive attempts seems to bring about a crash. Disable your network connection if you have to. 2) Don't save the Word document you're using for the mail merge. Copy your e-mail text into a new document, DON'T SAVE IT, and execute the mail merge from there. Don't ask me why this affects anything, but it does. 3) If you're sending out a large number of e-mails (in the thousands), break your source file down into chunks of about 1000, maybe 2000 records. Also, I only ever used Excel as a source file, so I don't know how well this system works with other data sources. If you're still having problems, try converting your data source to an Excel file. Saved as a 2003 or 2007 version. It doesn't seem to matter. I hope some of this helps those of you who are still experiencing this frustrating problem. "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#12
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
Bob, Thank you SO much for sharing what you've learned and confirming, for so
many, that this IS in fact a problem and not unique at all. I have spent/wasted countless hours struggling with this, both in Word 2003 and now on a brand new machine with Office 2007 out of the box, etc. I've even re-formatted and reinstalled to 'factory fresh' my entire machine in an attempt to get this mail merge "feature" to work as documented, thinking perhaps I had copied or restored some bug or problem from the old pc. I have been reading threads and posts all evening trying to find any solid information about this issue, and virtually every other time this topic has been posted it has been met with a scolding for not including enough data, or a hand slapping for not wording the question correctly. I was getting pretty disgusted with the attitudes of these non-answers. Thank you for your gracious and generous help. Just to have postive confirmation that there is a problem, and some solid suggestions on working around the issue, supplied by someone generous and truly interested in helping others, has me signing off tonight on a much more positive note. Thanks for taking the time to make a difference. "Bob" wrote: Also, if anyone has come up with a solution that doesn't involve going with an add-on or another product entirely, please post it. I'd love to see this problem resolved in a better way. "Bob" wrote: I've been having the exact same problem, and I've found that it isn't just limited to Office 2007; I've seen the same behavior on a machine with Office 2003. I've researched this problem in depth 3 times now, including posting the issue here twice, and I haven't found even an inkling of reason as to how to resolve this problem. I goofed around with a few things that seem to help, but Word still hangs frequently whenever we try to send out a large mail merge. I'll post these tweaks below. I'm just glad to see that finally my company isn't the only one experiencing this problem. It's one of the most frustrating troubleshooting issues I've had to deal with. The problem happens so randomly that's near impossible to find any fix that works consistently. Using 2007, you start a mail merge (using the lovely ribbon now), select recipients (we always use an Excel file as the source), click Finish and Merge, type a subject, and send as HTML (sending as Plain Text is a whole other issue). Sometimes we'll get through thousands of e-mail without a problem, sometimes we won't get through 2 without crashing... again and again and again. I tried this on 3 different machines, one with Office 2007, one with Office 2003. Both experienced the same problem. I then tried a mail merge with a cleanly formatted machine with a fresh install of XP and Office 2007. Again, the EXACT same problem. Theres no rhyme or reason to it. I dont know whats causing the problem, only that, at one point, it was working beautifully, and at the next, PLOP. I suspect that Windows updates are the cause of this problem. We didnt make any other company-wide installs during this period when mail merge stopped working. So this leaves us users with the following options: 1) Wait for Microsoft to first of all acknowledge this as a problem, then release an update that will fix it. I'm not holding my breath for this one, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. or, 2) Use an alternative product. I toyed around with Open Office as they also have a mail merge feature, but I could never get it to work. However, I just came across the following add-on tool: Mail Merge Toolkit (http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/). This tool, among other things, says that it makes merging more "reliable in operation." I purchased one license for my company and so far it seems to be working. We sent out a mail merge with 10,000 recipients this afternoon and it didn't crash once; no way would we have had this kind of consistency using Word alone. Really it's rather ridiculous that we ended up having to pay to get this feature to work when we should have had it to begin with, but the Toolkit is relatively cheap and at this point I'll take it if it works. And its a miracle if it does. Weve been having this problem for months and Im at my wits end. I honestly recommend this tool to anyone whos experiencing this problem. Here are the tweaks I was using before I found this tool if anyone is interested and doesn't feel like shelling out any money for this problem: 1) Keep Outlook open and set it to Work Offline. Any interruptions such as Send/Receive attempts seems to bring about a crash. Disable your network connection if you have to. 2) Don't save the Word document you're using for the mail merge. Copy your e-mail text into a new document, DON'T SAVE IT, and execute the mail merge from there. Don't ask me why this affects anything, but it does. 3) If you're sending out a large number of e-mails (in the thousands), break your source file down into chunks of about 1000, maybe 2000 records. Also, I only ever used Excel as a source file, so I don't know how well this system works with other data sources. If you're still having problems, try converting your data source to an Excel file. Saved as a 2003 or 2007 version. It doesn't seem to matter. I hope some of this helps those of you who are still experiencing this frustrating problem. "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#13
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
Can I suggest again that you contact MS Support (In the UK you will probably
have to contact "MS Professional Support" as the poroblem involves more than one product from their point of view), especially since it seems that you have a brand new copy of Office 2007, in which case the support should be free (unless your copy is an OEM version). I have tried to bring this problem to the attention of MS, and would report it myself via MS Support, but unfortunately, I have been unable to replicate the problem on my systems here (probably because I'm not doing real merges like this at the moment), which leaves me stuck when I am asked further questions and no-oone else provides me with an answer. One of the things I've been asked for is crash dump info. which of course I cannot provide (and AFAICS no-one else can provide unless Word actually crashes, which it does not appear to do. Even info. from the Windows Event log that is created when /you/ have to stop the Word process might be useful. Have you had the same experience that "Robert A." mentioned in this thread, i.e. that once the merge had gone wrong on a machine, it never worked again on that machine? If so, are you in a position to try the system restore approach that I suggested? I have been reading threads and posts all evening trying to find any solid information about this issue, and virtually every other time this topic has been posted it has been met with a scolding for not including enough data, or a hand slapping for not wording the question correctly. IMO that is always a shame, but FWIW there is another side to these things, which is that people who are genuinely trying to help do not always have enough info. to go on. In fact, the less common the problem, the more likely that is to be the case, because the chances are that it is being caused by a very specific combination of factors. It is quite common to spend quite a lot of time researching a problem, then discover that you cannot get any further without asking some (potentially relevant questions which frequently receive no response. -- Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk "ccstamper" wrote in message news Bob, Thank you SO much for sharing what you've learned and confirming, for so many, that this IS in fact a problem and not unique at all. I have spent/wasted countless hours struggling with this, both in Word 2003 and now on a brand new machine with Office 2007 out of the box, etc. I've even re-formatted and reinstalled to 'factory fresh' my entire machine in an attempt to get this mail merge "feature" to work as documented, thinking perhaps I had copied or restored some bug or problem from the old pc. I have been reading threads and posts all evening trying to find any solid information about this issue, and virtually every other time this topic has been posted it has been met with a scolding for not including enough data, or a hand slapping for not wording the question correctly. I was getting pretty disgusted with the attitudes of these non-answers. Thank you for your gracious and generous help. Just to have postive confirmation that there is a problem, and some solid suggestions on working around the issue, supplied by someone generous and truly interested in helping others, has me signing off tonight on a much more positive note. Thanks for taking the time to make a difference. "Bob" wrote: Also, if anyone has come up with a solution that doesn't involve going with an add-on or another product entirely, please post it. I'd love to see this problem resolved in a better way. "Bob" wrote: I've been having the exact same problem, and I've found that it isn't just limited to Office 2007; I've seen the same behavior on a machine with Office 2003. I've researched this problem in depth 3 times now, including posting the issue here twice, and I haven't found even an inkling of reason as to how to resolve this problem. I goofed around with a few things that seem to help, but Word still hangs frequently whenever we try to send out a large merge. I'll post these tweaks below. I'm just glad to see that finally my company isn't the only one experiencing this problem. It's one of the most frustrating troubleshooting issues I've had to deal with. The problem happens so randomly that's near impossible to find any fix that works consistently. Using 2007, you start a mail merge (using the lovely ribbon now), select recipients (we always use an Excel file as the source), click Finish and Merge, type a subject, and send as HTML (sending as Plain Text is a whole other issue). Sometimes we'll get through thousands of e-mail without a problem, sometimes we won't get through 2 without crashing... again and again and again. I tried this on 3 different machines, one with Office 2007, one with Office 2003. Both experienced the same problem. I then tried a mail merge with a cleanly formatted machine with a fresh install of XP and Office 2007. Again, the EXACT same problem. Theres no rhyme or reason to it. I dont know whats causing the problem, only that, at one point, it was working beautifully, and at the next, PLOP. I suspect that Windows updates are the cause of this problem. We didnt make any other company-wide installs during this period when mail merge stopped working. So this leaves us users with the following options: 1) Wait for Microsoft to first of all acknowledge this as a problem, then release an update that will fix it. I'm not holding my breath for this one, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. or, 2) Use an alternative product. I toyed around with Open Office as they also have a mail merge feature, but I could never get it to work. However, I just came across the following add-on tool: Mail Merge Toolkit (http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/). This tool, among other things, says that it makes merging more "reliable in operation." I purchased one license for my company and so far it seems to be working. We sent out a merge with 10,000 recipients this afternoon and it didn't crash once; no way would we have had this kind of consistency using Word alone. Really it's rather ridiculous that we ended up having to pay to get this feature to work when we should have had it to begin with, but the Toolkit is relatively cheap and at this point I'll take it if it works. And its a miracle if it does. Weve been having this problem for months and Im at my wits end. I honestly recommend this tool to anyone whos experiencing this problem. Here are the tweaks I was using before I found this tool if anyone is interested and doesn't feel like shelling out any money for this problem: 1) Keep Outlook open and set it to Work Offline. Any interruptions such as Send/Receive attempts seems to bring about a crash. Disable your network connection if you have to. 2) Don't save the Word document you're using for the mail merge. Copy your e-mail text into a new document, DON'T SAVE IT, and execute the mail merge from there. Don't ask me why this affects anything, but it does. 3) If you're sending out a large number of e-mails (in the thousands), break your source file down into chunks of about 1000, maybe 2000 records. Also, I only ever used Excel as a source file, so I don't know how well this system works with other data sources. If you're still having problems, try converting your data source to an Excel file. Saved as a 2003 or 2007 version. It doesn't seem to matter. I hope some of this helps those of you who are still experiencing this frustrating problem. "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#14
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
I purchased my copy of Office Professional 2007 with my LEnovo laptop through
directly through IBM. I have the physical install disks, but I'm not sure where that puts me in regard to free support from MS. I'm sure I should pursue that. At this point, attempting to get my taxes filed and in the midst of a major promotional sales period, I simply can't invest any more time or risk messing up my laptop in other ways, by experimenting and making changes purely to address this problem, although I appreciate your suggestions. As great as my frustration is over not having this tool working, I simply can't afford the time or the risk (I'm not that comfortable/confident making system changes and restoring, etc.) right now to personally troubleshoot it. The short term answer, which is lousy, is for me to continue to email my customers their monthly news note &/or specials by sending to a small group of them at a time, putting their info in the bcc field. Cumbersome and non-slick, but far less time consuming than playing hit-and-miss with the mail merge. I know at one point as I was struggling with this, and resending, the first couple dozen clients receive the same note, multiple times while others never got it. Anything I do at this point must be seamless to my clients. I have no desire to purchase any additional software to do my mass emails, by the way. I'll keep your notes handy should I feel brave at some point, however. Thanks for the input! "Peter Jamieson" wrote: Can I suggest again that you contact MS Support (In the UK you will probably have to contact "MS Professional Support" as the poroblem involves more than one product from their point of view), especially since it seems that you have a brand new copy of Office 2007, in which case the support should be free (unless your copy is an OEM version). I have tried to bring this problem to the attention of MS, and would report it myself via MS Support, but unfortunately, I have been unable to replicate the problem on my systems here (probably because I'm not doing real merges like this at the moment), which leaves me stuck when I am asked further questions and no-oone else provides me with an answer. One of the things I've been asked for is crash dump info. which of course I cannot provide (and AFAICS no-one else can provide unless Word actually crashes, which it does not appear to do. Even info. from the Windows Event log that is created when /you/ have to stop the Word process might be useful. Have you had the same experience that "Robert A." mentioned in this thread, i.e. that once the merge had gone wrong on a machine, it never worked again on that machine? If so, are you in a position to try the system restore approach that I suggested? I have been reading threads and posts all evening trying to find any solid information about this issue, and virtually every other time this topic has been posted it has been met with a scolding for not including enough data, or a hand slapping for not wording the question correctly. IMO that is always a shame, but FWIW there is another side to these things, which is that people who are genuinely trying to help do not always have enough info. to go on. In fact, the less common the problem, the more likely that is to be the case, because the chances are that it is being caused by a very specific combination of factors. It is quite common to spend quite a lot of time researching a problem, then discover that you cannot get any further without asking some (potentially relevant questions which frequently receive no response. -- Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk "ccstamper" wrote in message news Bob, Thank you SO much for sharing what you've learned and confirming, for so many, that this IS in fact a problem and not unique at all. I have spent/wasted countless hours struggling with this, both in Word 2003 and now on a brand new machine with Office 2007 out of the box, etc. I've even re-formatted and reinstalled to 'factory fresh' my entire machine in an attempt to get this mail merge "feature" to work as documented, thinking perhaps I had copied or restored some bug or problem from the old pc. I have been reading threads and posts all evening trying to find any solid information about this issue, and virtually every other time this topic has been posted it has been met with a scolding for not including enough data, or a hand slapping for not wording the question correctly. I was getting pretty disgusted with the attitudes of these non-answers. Thank you for your gracious and generous help. Just to have postive confirmation that there is a problem, and some solid suggestions on working around the issue, supplied by someone generous and truly interested in helping others, has me signing off tonight on a much more positive note. Thanks for taking the time to make a difference. "Bob" wrote: Also, if anyone has come up with a solution that doesn't involve going with an add-on or another product entirely, please post it. I'd love to see this problem resolved in a better way. "Bob" wrote: I've been having the exact same problem, and I've found that it isn't just limited to Office 2007; I've seen the same behavior on a machine with Office 2003. I've researched this problem in depth 3 times now, including posting the issue here twice, and I haven't found even an inkling of reason as to how to resolve this problem. I goofed around with a few things that seem to help, but Word still hangs frequently whenever we try to send out a large merge. I'll post these tweaks below. I'm just glad to see that finally my company isn't the only one experiencing this problem. It's one of the most frustrating troubleshooting issues I've had to deal with. The problem happens so randomly that's near impossible to find any fix that works consistently. Using 2007, you start a mail merge (using the lovely ribbon now), select recipients (we always use an Excel file as the source), click Finish and Merge, type a subject, and send as HTML (sending as Plain Text is a whole other issue). Sometimes we'll get through thousands of e-mail without a problem, sometimes we won't get through 2 without crashing... again and again and again. I tried this on 3 different machines, one with Office 2007, one with Office 2003. Both experienced the same problem. I then tried a mail merge with a cleanly formatted machine with a fresh install of XP and Office 2007. Again, the EXACT same problem. Theres no rhyme or reason to it. I dont know whats causing the problem, only that, at one point, it was working beautifully, and at the next, PLOP. I suspect that Windows updates are the cause of this problem. We didnt make any other company-wide installs during this period when mail merge stopped working. So this leaves us users with the following options: 1) Wait for Microsoft to first of all acknowledge this as a problem, then release an update that will fix it. I'm not holding my breath for this one, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. or, 2) Use an alternative product. I toyed around with Open Office as they also have a mail merge feature, but I could never get it to work. However, I just came across the following add-on tool: Mail Merge Toolkit (http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/). This tool, among other things, says that it makes merging more "reliable in operation." I purchased one license for my company and so far it seems to be working. We sent out a merge with 10,000 recipients this afternoon and it didn't crash once; no way would we have had this kind of consistency using Word alone. Really it's rather ridiculous that we ended up having to pay to get this feature to work when we should have had it to begin with, but the Toolkit is relatively cheap and at this point I'll take it if it works. And its a miracle if it does. Weve been having this problem for months and Im at my wits end. I honestly recommend this tool to anyone whos experiencing this problem. Here are the tweaks I was using before I found this tool if anyone is interested and doesn't feel like shelling out any money for this problem: 1) Keep Outlook open and set it to Work Offline. Any interruptions such as Send/Receive attempts seems to bring about a crash. Disable your network connection if you have to. 2) Don't save the Word document you're using for the mail merge. Copy your e-mail text into a new document, DON'T SAVE IT, and execute the mail merge from there. Don't ask me why this affects anything, but it does. 3) If you're sending out a large number of e-mails (in the thousands), break your source file down into chunks of about 1000, maybe 2000 records. Also, I only ever used Excel as a source file, so I don't know how well this system works with other data sources. If you're still having problems, try converting your data source to an Excel file. Saved as a 2003 or 2007 version. It doesn't seem to matter. I hope some of this helps those of you who are still experiencing this frustrating problem. "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#15
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
Unfortunately, in that case, the produce is supported by Lenovo rather that
directly by Microsoft. But if enought people can make an issue of it with Lenovo, they might then make an issue of it with Microsoft. -- Hope this helps. Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my services on a paid consulting basis. Doug Robbins - Word MVP "ccstamper" wrote in message ... I purchased my copy of Office Professional 2007 with my LEnovo laptop through directly through IBM. I have the physical install disks, but I'm not sure where that puts me in regard to free support from MS. I'm sure I should pursue that. At this point, attempting to get my taxes filed and in the midst of a major promotional sales period, I simply can't invest any more time or risk messing up my laptop in other ways, by experimenting and making changes purely to address this problem, although I appreciate your suggestions. As great as my frustration is over not having this tool working, I simply can't afford the time or the risk (I'm not that comfortable/confident making system changes and restoring, etc.) right now to personally troubleshoot it. The short term answer, which is lousy, is for me to continue to email my customers their monthly news note &/or specials by sending to a small group of them at a time, putting their info in the bcc field. Cumbersome and non-slick, but far less time consuming than playing hit-and-miss with the mail merge. I know at one point as I was struggling with this, and resending, the first couple dozen clients receive the same note, multiple times while others never got it. Anything I do at this point must be seamless to my clients. I have no desire to purchase any additional software to do my mass emails, by the way. I'll keep your notes handy should I feel brave at some point, however. Thanks for the input! "Peter Jamieson" wrote: Can I suggest again that you contact MS Support (In the UK you will probably have to contact "MS Professional Support" as the poroblem involves more than one product from their point of view), especially since it seems that you have a brand new copy of Office 2007, in which case the support should be free (unless your copy is an OEM version). I have tried to bring this problem to the attention of MS, and would report it myself via MS Support, but unfortunately, I have been unable to replicate the problem on my systems here (probably because I'm not doing real merges like this at the moment), which leaves me stuck when I am asked further questions and no-oone else provides me with an answer. One of the things I've been asked for is crash dump info. which of course I cannot provide (and AFAICS no-one else can provide unless Word actually crashes, which it does not appear to do. Even info. from the Windows Event log that is created when /you/ have to stop the Word process might be useful. Have you had the same experience that "Robert A." mentioned in this thread, i.e. that once the merge had gone wrong on a machine, it never worked again on that machine? If so, are you in a position to try the system restore approach that I suggested? I have been reading threads and posts all evening trying to find any solid information about this issue, and virtually every other time this topic has been posted it has been met with a scolding for not including enough data, or a hand slapping for not wording the question correctly. IMO that is always a shame, but FWIW there is another side to these things, which is that people who are genuinely trying to help do not always have enough info. to go on. In fact, the less common the problem, the more likely that is to be the case, because the chances are that it is being caused by a very specific combination of factors. It is quite common to spend quite a lot of time researching a problem, then discover that you cannot get any further without asking some (potentially relevant questions which frequently receive no response. -- Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk "ccstamper" wrote in message news Bob, Thank you SO much for sharing what you've learned and confirming, for so many, that this IS in fact a problem and not unique at all. I have spent/wasted countless hours struggling with this, both in Word 2003 and now on a brand new machine with Office 2007 out of the box, etc. I've even re-formatted and reinstalled to 'factory fresh' my entire machine in an attempt to get this mail merge "feature" to work as documented, thinking perhaps I had copied or restored some bug or problem from the old pc. I have been reading threads and posts all evening trying to find any solid information about this issue, and virtually every other time this topic has been posted it has been met with a scolding for not including enough data, or a hand slapping for not wording the question correctly. I was getting pretty disgusted with the attitudes of these non-answers. Thank you for your gracious and generous help. Just to have postive confirmation that there is a problem, and some solid suggestions on working around the issue, supplied by someone generous and truly interested in helping others, has me signing off tonight on a much more positive note. Thanks for taking the time to make a difference. "Bob" wrote: Also, if anyone has come up with a solution that doesn't involve going with an add-on or another product entirely, please post it. I'd love to see this problem resolved in a better way. "Bob" wrote: I've been having the exact same problem, and I've found that it isn't just limited to Office 2007; I've seen the same behavior on a machine with Office 2003. I've researched this problem in depth 3 times now, including posting the issue here twice, and I haven't found even an inkling of reason as to how to resolve this problem. I goofed around with a few things that seem to help, but Word still hangs frequently whenever we try to send out a large merge. I'll post these tweaks below. I'm just glad to see that finally my company isn't the only one experiencing this problem. It's one of the most frustrating troubleshooting issues I've had to deal with. The problem happens so randomly that's near impossible to find any fix that works consistently. Using 2007, you start a mail merge (using the lovely ribbon now), select recipients (we always use an Excel file as the source), click Finish and Merge, type a subject, and send as HTML (sending as Plain Text is a whole other issue). Sometimes we'll get through thousands of e-mail without a problem, sometimes we won't get through 2 without crashing... again and again and again. I tried this on 3 different machines, one with Office 2007, one with Office 2003. Both experienced the same problem. I then tried a mail merge with a cleanly formatted machine with a fresh install of XP and Office 2007. Again, the EXACT same problem. There's no rhyme or reason to it. I don't know what's causing the problem, only that, at one point, it was working beautifully, and at the next, PLOP. I suspect that Windows updates are the cause of this problem. We didn't make any other company-wide installs during this period when mail merge stopped working. So this leaves us users with the following options: 1) Wait for Microsoft to first of all acknowledge this as a problem, then release an update that will fix it. I'm not holding my breath for this one, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. or, 2) Use an alternative product. I toyed around with Open Office as they also have a mail merge feature, but I could never get it to work. However, I just came across the following add-on tool: Mail Merge Toolkit (http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/). This tool, among other things, says that it makes merging more "reliable in operation." I purchased one license for my company and so far it seems to be working. We sent out a merge with 10,000 recipients this afternoon and it didn't crash once; no way would we have had this kind of consistency using Word alone. Really it's rather ridiculous that we ended up having to pay to get this feature to work when we should have had it to begin with, but the Toolkit is relatively cheap and at this point I'll take it if it works. And it's a miracle if it does. We've been having this problem for months and I'm at my wit's end. I honestly recommend this tool to anyone who's experiencing this problem. Here are the tweaks I was using before I found this tool if anyone is interested and doesn't feel like shelling out any money for this problem: 1) Keep Outlook open and set it to Work Offline. Any interruptions such as Send/Receive attempts seems to bring about a crash. Disable your network connection if you have to. 2) Don't save the Word document you're using for the mail merge. Copy your e-mail text into a new document, DON'T SAVE IT, and execute the mail merge from there. Don't ask me why this affects anything, but it does. 3) If you're sending out a large number of e-mails (in the thousands), break your source file down into chunks of about 1000, maybe 2000 records. Also, I only ever used Excel as a source file, so I don't know how well this system works with other data sources. If you're still having problems, try converting your data source to an Excel file. Saved as a 2003 or 2007 version. It doesn't seem to matter. I hope some of this helps those of you who are still experiencing this frustrating problem. "wg_tech" wrote: we are using Office 2007, trying to do a word email merge to send to a large number of email addresses. We will not run into the spam issues because we are sending only to in-house email addrs directly from exchange acct to others. Word stops responding (hangs) during the merge, we originally thought to many for Word to handle, so we cut the list down to 255 and still the same problem. Then, we tried again just to see with 1200 and all worked. So there is no real pattern to the hangs. Have searched the web and other have similar issues. We have 1G ram, 80G hd, dual core proc, on this single task machine since we will be sending 1 to 2K emails per session. Any information is greatly appreciated. |
#16
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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2007 E-mail merge hangs (not responding)
I've been having problems with Word not responding when I do a mail merge
from Excel to a file... I've been able to get around it by making sure EVERY record for EVERY field on the layout has data in it -- no empty cells. This doesn't help when you want to do any kind of dynamic layout, but at least it doesn't hang the application. Maybe that's what happening for you too. What is the best way to get Microsoft to look into something like this? |
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