Data Merge problem in Mac:Office 2004

[AndyC812]

I have a spreadsheet that was developed in Windows Excel 2003 and am trying
to get it to run in Mac:Office 2004 on OS X. I have some report templates in
Word that suck the data out of the spreadsheet using Mail Merge in Windows
(Data Merge in MacOS). Sometimes the fields come over truncated, or worse
they come over with u_n_d_e_r_s_c_o_r_e_s between every letter in the merge
field. These underscores are NOT on the Excel side, they appear after a
merge. Occasionally a mail merge field will have an underscore added in the
front of the data only. I have never seen anything like it. Is this a known
problem with Data Merge on Word? I can't find anything about this on your
support websites, and no one has responded to requests on the Mac forums. Any
help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Andy

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Not a clue....never heard of this before....

Does the same thing happen with all spreadsheets or just this one?

Can you try making a teeny change in the spreadsheet and resaving on the
Mac?

Is there anything notable about the fields or the font used or anything
peculiar that you might point out to lead to a clue?

 

[AndyC812]

NO. And it gets weirder. The fields that have the underscores exhibit that
behavior only if they are longer than 255 characters. However, I have fields
coming over just FINE that are over 1000 characters long! I formatted both
cells the same on Excel side, and formatted the fields the same way on the
Word side and still no luck! It's maddening.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Andy:

What is the data type of th cell in Excel?

I am not an Excel pilot, and I avoid Data Merge if I can: but there's
something in the back of my mind about "Fixed" length vs "General" data
types.

A Fixed length field is limited (to 127 or 254 characters?) and has no need
for delimiters, a variable length field can run up to (1024 or 2048?
Characters) but needs delimiters.

Cheers

I have a spreadsheet that was developed in Windows Excel 2003 and am trying
to get it to run in Mac:Office 2004 on OS X. I have some report templates in
Word that suck the data out of the spreadsheet using Mail Merge in Windows
(Data Merge in MacOS). Sometimes the fields come over truncated, or worse
they come over with u_n_d_e_r_s_c_o_r_e_s between every letter in the merge
field. These underscores are NOT on the Excel side, they appear after a
merge. Occasionally a mail merge field will have an underscore added in the
front of the data only. I have never seen anything like it. Is this a known
problem with Data Merge on Word? I can't find anything about this on your
support websites, and no one has responded to requests on the Mac forums. Any
help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Andy

--
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Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[AndyC812]

Both are of type General. I even deleted the one that wasn't working and
recreated it by placing it next to the one that was working and copying it's
format. That didn't work. I have never seen Fixed format in Excel as a
choice.

Funny thing is when I do a format cell on the field that doesn't work I get
the first line of text in the Sample box, but on the field that does work I
get a series of pound signs i.e., ################, in the Sample box. That
is the only discernable difference.