When merging comments from an Excel spreadsheet (also happens with same
comments in Access database) noticed that the longer strings were being cut
off in mid word. I would guess there is a limit to the length of the string
that can be merged? Is it 255 characters or what? Got around the problem
by pasting relevant part of the spreadsheet into a Word document and merged
from there.

Is there any way to solve this one without having to paste into Word?

Another issue is when spreadsheet contains a "mixture" of strings and
numbers. There was no problem with the merge "per se" - no error message
etc, but only the numbers were merged - the strings were simply " ignored"
as far as I can see. The same data transferred into Access or a table in
Word merged both. Tried to fool it by putting a "dummy" row of string data
at the top of the block of Excel I wanted to merge but it still merged only
the numbers. Any ideas?

Robert B. Marks