[Mike]

Hi. I am trying to run a mailmerge that has 50 mergefields that i need to
enter. However word is only reading the first 30 or so frrom the excel
document. Is there a way to get word to read the rest? in the future there
will be about 70 fields that are required.

Many thanks

[Mike]

I saw a recommendation to convert the xls file to a csv file. this did not
work.

I made an error in the first post. I have over 256 merge fields that i
require.

[Peter Jamieson]

I'm surprised you had problems with over 30 fields, unless perhaps you
have quite a lot of data in them.

"Over 256" is tricky whatever you do. Even if you are using Office 2007
(you don't say which version), where Excel can have large numbers of
columns, none of Word's out-of-the-box mechanisms for getting data from
Excel will go beyond 255/256; Word can in principle work with delimited
files such as .csv with many more columns, but
a. it has to use its own internal text converter to do it, otherwise
it is still stuck with a 255/256 limitation
b. if you have delimiter characters in your data, e.g. if your .csv is
comma-delimited and your data contains commas, cariage return/line
feeds, or double quote characters, and they are not properly handled,
Word will not be able to read the file correctly.
c. With large/complex data, Word sometimes mis-recognises the
character encoding. My guess is that it will also have difficulty if you
have a lot of multiline data
d. recent versions of Word seem actually to be worse at this than
older versions. However, I have never been able to work out exactly what
causes it to fail.
e. the fact that you were unable to get your .csv to work is not a
good sign. However, at the very least it may be worth checking your csv
f. your other options are
- find a data source that /can/ handle large numbers of columns. The
last time I looked, SQL Server can do so (however, I am not sure the
free "Lite" versions can do so). But then you have to be in a position
to install that, work out how to use it, and work out how you are going
to work with it, because even working with something like Access will
probably re-impose 255/256 column limitations. Even then, Word is likely
to struggle with large column counts, e.g. when you try to examine the
data in Edit Recipients.
- create your own merge process, using Word VBA to automate Excel to
get the data cell by cell and insert it into your MailMerge Main
Document. Even that is not a comletely trivial process.

All that said, it's probably worth trying to fix your .csv data - e.g.
if it is comma-delimited, you need to ensure that
a. every field that contains (or to be sure, could contain) delimiter
characters is quoted - in this case:
- commas are field delimiters
- double-quotes are "text delimiters"
- carriage returns/line feeds are "record delimiters"
b. "text delimiters" are doubled up when they occur in your data

e.g. if you have
t1,t2,t3
row1text1,row1text2,row1text3
row2text1,row2,text2,row2text3
row3text1,row3 "text2",row3text3
row4text1,row4
text2,row4text3

then you need to change it at least to be

t1,t2,t3
row1text1,row1text2,row1text3
row2text1,"row2,text2",row2text3
row3text1,"row3 ""text2""",row3text3
row4text1,"row4
text2",row4text3

You might need to quote all the text fields.


Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

On 27/01/2010 09:20, Mike wrote:
I saw a recommendation to convert the xls file to a csv file. this did not
work.

I made an error in the first post. I have over 256 merge fields that i
require.