DDE, microsoft-ds

[Oskar]

(W2K, Office 2000, updates, service packs installed)
Following some security advice I disabled microsoft-ds. But then MS-Word hangs if I open a (specific) mailmerge-Document which gets data from an excel-sheet. "WORD is waiting for Excel to accept DDE commands". (I think I could open another document which uses the same sheet but different data.

Then I reactivated microsoft-ds and now the DDE is working again

Is that obvious to anybody? Is there a reference that could illuminate me

Oskar

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Just guessing, but with W2K, DDE may just be a "special case" of NetDDE,
which AFAIK does rely on Active Directory.

If you are in a position to change this merge application, if you can't use
DDE, from Word 2000 you can try connecting to Excel using ODBC or the Excel
Converter - but you will probably have to deal with numerous differences in
behaviour, especially the formatting of dates, numbers, percentages and
things that ODBC (say) thinks are numeric. You can generally get around
most of these by formatting your columns in Excel appropriately and using
format switches (\# and \@) in the MERGEFIELD fields in your Word mail merge
main document.

--
Peter Jamieson

(W2K, Office 2000, updates, service packs installed):
Following some security advice I disabled microsoft-ds. But then MS-Word

hangs if I open a (specific) mailmerge-Document which gets data from an
excel-sheet. "WORD is waiting for Excel to accept DDE commands". (I think I
could open another document which uses the same sheet but different data.)

 

[Oskar]

One problem was that I couldn't open the document with DDE not working because Word "hangs" (or was 15 minutes waiting not enough?). Therefore I couldn't change the interface. :-

Oskar

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Try creating a blank new document and inserting the existing document into
it. You may lose some stuff, including any sort/filter settings, but you
should retain the merge fields etc.

--
Peter Jamieson

One problem was that I couldn't open the document with DDE not working

because Word "hangs" (or was 15 minutes waiting not enough?). Therefore I
couldn't change the interface. :-(

 

[Don]

I'm encountering this same problem of DDE not working
when I try to get the data source (either Excel or
Access) to merge with a Word document.

I'm using Office 2000 Prof and Windows XP.

Can anyone help, please?

-----Original Message-----
One problem was that I couldn't open the document with

DDE not working because Word "hangs" (or was 15 minutes
waiting not enough?). Therefore I couldn't change the
interface. :-(