Changed functionality in Word 2002 and 2003

[Guest]

I work for a software company that writes applications
primarily in PowerBuilder. However, much of what our users
do involves text editor and Word is one of the
applications we link to and have a standard set of .dot
templates with programming associated with it.

In Word 2002 and 2003, there seems to be increased
functionality for Mail Merge that interferes with some of
our programming and we're struggling to compensate for it.

As Word launches it gets a database call and is asking for
Record Header Delimiter parameters where it never occured
in previous versions (Word 97 and 2000). Is there any way
to either go back to previous compatibility in Word or
compensate for this additional "smartness" in this new
version?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Is there any way

to either go back to previous compatibility in Word or
compensate for this additional "smartness" in this new
version?

There's no general-purpose way to say to Word "behave like Word 2000". In
this case, the sort of thing you might be able to do may depend on
a. exactly what the application is doing
b. how much control you (or your application) have over the mail merge main
documents themselves and the /content/ of e.g. Header Files.

One of the things that has changed is Word's default data source connection
mechanism. If the Word document being opened by your application is a Mail
Merge Main Document, there is nothing you can do in code to influence what
Word does when it tries to open the attached data source (except of course
that if you know what the data source is called, you can ensure that it is
either there or not there). If you want to influence how it opens the data
source, you have to ensure that the document is /not/ a Mail Merge Main
Document before it opens. Then you can use OpenHeaderSource and
OpenDataSource to set up headers and data.

In the case of OpenDataSource, using the parameter
Subtype:=wdMergeSubtypeWord2000

makes Word use the Word 2000 "path" to opening data sources, but I expect
its behaviour will still differ in some respects.

If you are using Header Source files, it /may/ make a difference if you can
ensure that the lines are doubled up, e.g.

instead of
field1,field2,field3

try
field1,field2,field3
field1,field2,field3

Best I can do on the information provided.