Character max

[JKarchner]

I dont know what the cause of this is, but i would assume that it is because
of a character limit. When i do a mail merge from Access from a memo field,
after so many characters the rest of the data is displayed in "?". It
appears to be made of the same number of characters as the data, it is just
displayed with "?"s instead of the actually character. Can anyone help with
this?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Which version of Word/Access?

Peter Jamieson

 

[JKarchner]

Sorry for the timely response, both are 2003.

Which version of Word/Access?

Peter Jamieson

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Do you know what connection method Word is using to get the data?

If not, with your Mail merge Main document open, can you please try to start
the VBA Editor (Tools|Macro|Visual Basic Editor), look for the Immediate
window - typically at the bottom right, but if it isn't there, press
ctrl-G. Then type the following, or copy/paste it from this message, into
the Immediate window and press return to execute it

print activedocument.MailMerge.DataSource.ConnectString

then copy the result into a message in this thread.

Alternatively, if you don't have access to VBA or don't really want to go
there, can you save your document as a "Web Page" (not filtered) and close
it. Then located the .htm, and either
a. open it in Notepad or
b. check Word Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversion at open", open the
HTML file, but choose the plain text option so you can see the HTML codes.

Then look down the file until you see

<w:MailMergeConnectString>

(It shouldn't be far from the top - perhaps 25-30 lines)

Does the text immediately after <w:MailMergeConnectString> say "DSN",
"Provider" or perhaps "Table" or "Query"?

The only circumstances I can get anything similar to what you see on my
system (with a fairly small table but some quite big memo fields) is if I
open the data source using DDE or ODBC, and it contains non-ANSI Unicode
characters. However, by default, Word uses OLE DB to connect to Access and
that particular problem would only occur if you had Unicode characters that
were not available in the relevant font. And in either case, it sounds much
more random than that. But
a. does the problem start at the same point in the field each time?
b. can you estimate how many characters are OK before the "???"
c. do your memo fields contain lots of paragraphs?

Peter Jamieson

 

[JKarchner]

I believe this is what you had asked for: <w:MailMergeConnectString>QUERY
qryARMSSupplierProfiles</w:MailMergeConnectString>
I know that I use the DDE method, because i had read on this community that
using DDE was the only way to use queries. So it does say QUERY immediately
following that.
For the rest of your questions:
a. yes it does start at the same point in the document
b. 255 characters are ok
c. i dont know how much experience you have with Access, but i will try to
explain this is simply as i can. Basically, i concatenate memo fields
together for this report, and for each item that is concatenated a new
paragraph is created. So technically there are some that have 3 - 6
paragraphs, i do not know if that qualifies as a lot.

Anyways, this only happens twice in my document. So i have no problem
fixiing it by hand, but now i am curious as to how and why this happens and
also how to go about fixing it. Thank you again for all your help and i will
be waiting for your response.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

c. i dont know how much experience you have with Access, but i will try to

explain this is simply as i can.

I appreciate that, thanks!

I know that I use the DDE method, because i had read on this community
that
using DDE was the only way to use queries.

OK, this is not the whole truth: you need DDE to execute certain types of
query, including
a. parameter queries
b. queries that call Access VBA functions
c. queries that use some of the financial series functions and a couple of
other odd functions
d. queries that use the Jet SQL wildcards * and ? in a database that has
not been converted to ANSI SQL syntax
e. a few other things (I don't claim to know them all).

That's rather a lot, obviously, and if you have one of those queries there's
no alternative to DDE. But if you can use OLEDB this problem may disappear.

DDe works OK on my data here until the memo field reaches 4096 characters,
then it doesn't see the record at all. This is on an Access 2000 format
database. other than that, I can't do any more research today but will have
a look again tomorrow.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Peter Jamieson]

OK, I didn't find out anything more about a DDE limitation, but stuff
breaking after 255 characters used to be commonplace. I'm wondering whether
there is a difference in
a. in our versions of Word or Access (my version of Word is 11.8106.8107
and Access is 11.6566.8107) - you can get these details in Word Help|About
and Access Help|About
b. in the version of Jet (if it coes to that, I'll try to work out how to
find that out)
c. in the versions of Windows (Win XP Pro here)

Also,
d. was your database newly created in Access 2003 (in which case it is
likely to be Access 2000 or 2003 format) or has it been upgraded from an
earlier version?
e. are the first 25 memos in the column you're having trouble with shorter
than or longer than 255 characters? (You can find out using a query that
returns len(the_memo_field_name)). But I'm clutching at straws there.

Peter Jamieson

 

[JKarchner]

First of all, thanks for all of your help thus far.
a. Access (11.6566.6568) and Word (11.6568.6568), maybe the difference in
the version of word is the problem.
c. i believe i am running the same
d. it was created in Access 2003 (Access 2002 - 2003 file format)
e. this might be where the problem lies as the 25 first memo fields all
contain less than 255 characters. However, i thought that by checking the
box for "confirm conversion..." was supposed to fix that.

Again thanks for all of your help.

 

[JKarchner]

I do have VBA running in the query and that is why i need to use DDE, thank
you for clearing that up for me.

 

[JKarchner]

does anyone have any thoughts on this one?

First of all, thanks for all of your help thus far.
a. Access (11.6566.6568) and Word (11.6568.6568), maybe the difference in
the version of word is the problem.
c. i believe i am running the same
d. it was created in Access 2003 (Access 2002 - 2003 file format)
e. this might be where the problem lies as the 25 first memo fields all
contain less than 255 characters. However, i thought that by checking the
box for "confirm conversion..." was supposed to fix that.

Again thanks for all of your help.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

No more info. as to why you get a 255 limit, but...
a. is there any way to avoid using the Access VBA function in your query?
What does the function need to do?
b. in your situation would it be feasible to do a two-step process where
you
- did whatever was necessary to run your query+VBA function, but used it to
crreate a new table
- use the new table as your data source?

Peter Jamieson

 

[JKarchner]

a. i dont believe there is any way to avoid the Access VBA in my query. The
way my DB is set up is that i have a table that stores all of the
affiliates/joint ventures (and product supplied by it) for each company
(stored in memo field). So the table will have multiple records for each
company. The VBA function combines all of the affiliates/joint ventures into
one record that i mail merge to a document to fit into one field.

b. that is an option that i can always choose to do, but it seems that in
the end it will create the same amount of work (what with having to delete
the table after it is done being used, or whenever the data needs to be
updated).

Thank you for all of your help.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Just looking through the various KB articles etc, I wonder if you are doing
either of the following:
a. in your table definition, do you have a format specification (such as
"<"). At some point, this appears to have caused truncation, although it
doesn't appear to do so here.
b. in your query, are you applying any functions to the memo text, e.g.
concatenating it with "" (as people sometimes do)? That appears to make
Access see the output field as "text" and truncate it.

Also, as a bit more of a long shot, is/are the memos that you're passing to
Word the same one(s) that you're processign in your Access VBA function? I
just wonder whether truncation might be occurring as a side-effect.

Peter Jamieson