Extra space between mergefield name and trailing curly brace

[Bunnyman]

We've noticed a problem that seems to appear in MSW 2003 that was not there
before with merged fields. The original authors of the word document
template manually entered the field names with curly braces. When the
document is merged with the Excel data source there are a number of field
mismatches -- word displays many of the document fields with trailing
underscores -- indicating that it read spaces as part of the merge field name
-- is there any default way to ignore this behavior?

\jm

 

[Bunnyman]

All,

On further inspection it also looks as if Word is interpretting the column
headings based upon formatting in the cells. For example, a column whose
first row has the value "Sales" then has numbers in a $##,###,###.00 format
in subsequent rows. The first cell (with the value Sales) has the same
formatting, but this does not display -- since the value shows as text. In
MSW2000/Excel2000 this did not matter -- in MSW2003/SP1 and Excel2003/SP1
this appears to be a problem as the merged field name when it comes across
from Excel will have any number of trailing "underscores" that appears to be
an interpretation of the cell format. (BTW -- We get these spreadsheets and
word documents from a 3rd party -- which we then merge and send to our
clients. We recently upgraded to 2003 and this problem (and others) began to
appear.

jm

 

[Doug Robbins]

Try turning on "Confirm conversions at open" under Tools>Options>General and
then try the different connection methods that will be presented to you when
you attach the data source to the main document.

--
Please respond to the Newsgroup for the benefit of others who may be
interested. Questions sent directly to me will only be answered on a paid
consulting basis.

Hope this helps,
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Bunnyman]

The "confirm" option handles the OLEDB vs. DDE problem -- but Word 2003 still
interprets the fields if they have formatting attached -- even if the
formatting is not relevant. I edited the word doc and removed the extra
space (and generated underscores) from the merge fields and the closing curly
braces -- then I changed the formatting on the Excel columns for the 1st row
(the row with the "field labels") and it works fine.

Looks like 2003 interprets the formatting differently.

\jm