excel/word merge: why are some data fields partially truncated?

[brooke]

i am creating a word document based on an excel spreadsheet. it appears that
some data fields (which are complete in excel) are truncated when they are
merged into the word document. it seems to be a random occurance. for
instance, it does not seem to be a factor of numbers of characters in the
data field.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Unfortunately, I don't think anyone knows the answer to this question. There
are some suggestions that it is to do with either the total amount of data
in the record, or in the data source, or to do with a limit on some buffer
that Word uses during mailmerge - for example, it may try to cache a certain
number of records and start truncating fields when the buffer fills. One of
these days I may attempt some better controlled experiments to try to find
out, but I'd rather MS just made it work or told us what the limitations
are.

Peter Jamieson