Data Source - Columns vs Rows.

[Chris Mitchell]

Is it possible for the data source for a mail merge document to contain the
data for each recipient in columns as opposed to rows?



If so how?



I have a data source that contains over the MS Excel limit of 256 items for
each recipient, and don't have sufficient experience of MS Access to use
this instead.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Word, and its various converters etc. only know how to use columns. To use
Excel rows you would probably have to use a Pivot Table or some such, in
which case I suspect you would end up encountering the same limit at some
point.

However, I think you would still encounter a 256-column limit even if you
did know how to use MS Access, so you're probaly not losing out there.

The only suggestions I can make are
a. if you never need 256 in any of the mailmerges you want to create, find
a simple way in Excel to create the smaller data source(s) you really need
b. if you must have over 256 columns, you will probably only be able to do
it using a format such as a delimited text file. However, I do not know if
there is a simple way to export Excel row data into columns in a text file
either. Even if you manage that, you may find that Word has difficulty
recognising the file encoding and delimiters, fields containing large
amounts of data etc., and you may need to change the way Word connects to
the text file to get it to do so.

 

[Chris Mitchell]

Thought this might be the case so I've created a number of documents, each
of which gets its data from a different worksheet in the same excel
workbook. I've then created a master document that includes each of these
using {INCLUDETEXT} but this is very new ground for me!



Ideally I would like to have a single document that gets the data for
different sections from different worksheets in the same Excel workbook, but
can't find a way of doing this. Is this possible? If so how?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Ideally I would like to have a single document that gets the data for

different sections from different worksheets in the same Excel workbook, but
can't find a way of doing this. Is this possible? If so how?

Using mailmerge, the answer hasn't changed since the last time you asked
You can get data into documents by other means (e.g. via LINK fields,
DATABASE fields, and using VBA), but since you've gone along the suggested
route I'd carry on unless you can already see that it's not going to meet
your needs.