Edit Recipients dialog box - data shifted/scrambled

[C. Cunningham]

Hello,

I am working on a Word 2002 mail merge, with an Excel 2002 worksheet as the
datasource. (Using Windows XP Professional operating system.)

The data that we are previewing and attempting to filter in the Edit
Recipients Dialog Box has shifted on some records, i.e. in the Last Name
column, it shows some last names, but some first names. On those where it
shows the first names, the entire row of data has shifted one column to the
left, in effect scrambling all of our data, and making the filters
ineffective. (The excel sheet remains correct and unchanged, no data has
actually shifted in the data source, only in the edit recipients dialog box
view.)

BACKGROUND
Last week the merge worked properly, but this week we are having troubles
with it. After opening the merge letter, we use the mail merge toolbar to
attach the data source, and then open the mail merge recipients dialog box.
In the past, we have used the filters to select all records with "SEND
LETTER" as the criteria in a certain column.

We have two "comments" columns in the Excel sheet that come before the "Last
Name" and "First Name" columns. We have found that the data shifts only on
those records where the first "Internal Comments" column has been left blank.
As a test, we typed test data into the internal comments cell for each
record, and this seems to have "fixed" our issue for now. However, we do not
want to keep this unneeded info in those cells, and would rather leave them
blank if no comments have been made.

(In case it helps, we are using the add-in from Graham's site to merge to
individual documents. Also, in the Internal Comments cells we have used the
"Alt+Enter" command to force a new line entry in the same cell. Not sure if
either of these has a bearing on the issue.)

We use mail merge extensively, and have never had this issue before... it
has me stumped. We use these excel and word documents as templates for many
programs that we coordinate, and would very much like to resolve the issue in
the master templates if possible. Has anyone else ever had an issue similiar
to this? Or does anyone have any suggestions as to why the sudden shift in
our data and how to resolve it?

Thanks!
Cara

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I have tried to reproduce this (although so far I have only been able to use
Word/Excel 2003, not 2002), but have not been able to do so. I think it has
been mentioned before, but in some cases the problem may have been to do
with quote characters in the data, which doesn't seem to be the case here.

Two rather obvious suggestions, assuming it's occurring on more than one
system:
a. are you using automatic updates from MS? If so, are you in a position to
restore your system to a point where everything worked, then work forward
and identify which update seems to have caused the problem? If it's
impossible to skip that particular update (and longer term, it usually is in
my experience) then I don't think you have much option but to work around
the problem in the way you already do, or contact MS Technical Support
directly.
b. have you tried recreating your Workbook from scratch?

I suppose you can also try changing the connection method to DDE or ODBC,
even if it's just to see if the problem still occurs.

Peter Jamieson