Data Merge Manager ate my records

[Tiff Sunbacon]

This really is the last straw.

Can anyone tell me how 150 records (a day's work) can just vanish? No
crashes. No shut down. No quitting. Just the last 150 odd records have
disappeared.

Why can't I 'save' the file in Data Merge Manager?

I just can't believe all that data has vanised for no reason. Surely
they lurking somewhere?

Yours in desperate exasperation
Tiff

 

[Tiff Sunbacon]

Hi Tiff:

Well: You select some records and you press the delete key. The records go
away! If you have not saved the document, you do not get them back

Thanks for you eminently sensible advice John. In fact it wasn't me
that was having the problem but a colleague but I do know that the
delete key wasn't pressed at any point and this is not the first time
this has happened.

I've had to cut my losses and do the mailshot in Appleworks using its
database to set up the names, addresses and variable fields.

I would take issue with you about Word in this respect though. It's
seems a fundamental fault in software design to have the 'save' option
unavailable at any part of the process. This seems unique to the Data
Manager part of MS Office.

 

[Tiff Sunbacon]

Hey Tiff:

Save is "Command + s" in every Macintosh application. Even Word...

Not when data merge is up.

I think I may have discovered what we've been doing wrong. If you don't
create the merge document (a letter) and save it, then although the
data file is there it cannot be accessed? And even though I create a
new form letter, it cannot use the existing data file?

Thanks

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Tiff:

If you have not defined any fields in the data source document, Word will
not allow you to save it. Once you have defined your fields, Word will
force a save at that point, then open the Add Records dialog.

Once the Add Records dialog appears, Command + s will work to save the Main
Document and Data Source documents at any time.

For anything other than trivial data merges, you would probably use a
structured format such as Excel for your data source. In which case, the
data source can be created and saved at any time, outside the Data Merge
manager.

The only real trick to it is that the data source must be a tabular
structure containing one column for each merge field and one row for each
merge letter or record.

If you have an existing Data Source file, you can use this with any Form
Letter. But you cannot use any of these files until they have been saved,
because until they have been saved, as far as the computer is concerned they
do not exist. Until it is saved, a file (either Word or Excel) is just a
collection of bits in memory: until you write it to disk and thus give it a
file name, the computer has no way to reference it.

Hope this helps

Not when data merge is up.

I think I may have discovered what we've been doing wrong. If you don't
create the merge document (a letter) and save it, then although the
data file is there it cannot be accessed? And even though I create a
new form letter, it cannot use the existing data file?

Thanks

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410