Rading your message again, I think the problem is that the data source is
attached to your .dot file.
The problem is that in Word 2002/2003, Word seems to try to open the file
twice - once when it opens the .dot with the data source connected, and once
when it opens the .doc that is created from the .dot. However, when it tries
to open the file attached to the .doc, it is already open exclusively and
Word cannot open it again. This was not the behaviour in Word 2000.
You should be able to test that by disconnecting the data source from the
..dot and only connecting it in the .doc. Unfortunately what that usually
means is that you have to write an AutoNew macro (or something like that) to
open the data source whenever a new .doc is created from the .dot.
The thing about the 255 field limit is that it does depend on the data
source, but it also depends on the way that Word tries to connect to the
data source. In the case of text (csv) type files, Word has three
mechanisms:
a. its internal text converter
b. ODBC
c. OLEDB (the default in Word 2002/2003)
As far as I know, (b) and (c) will limit you to at most 255 fields. (a)
allows more columns, but since there is no specification of the maximum we
are basically at the mercy of what Microsoft decides to do in future.
Further, when you open a text file as a data source, you may have to force
Word to use (a) (again, checking Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversion
at open" is the only way to do this in the User Interface.
One thing that has certainly changed over the years is the text converter
tries to check the character encoding of the file. If it is "not sure", it
may pop up an additional dialog box. As far as I know, Word uses a set of
heuristics to do this (because nothing in the file explicitly defines the
character set being used, and I have certainly heard reports that large
numbers of fields or large field contents can trigger display of this dialog
box. All you can really do is see what happens on your system(s) and deal
with the problem if it occurs.
Peter Jamieson