Field codes are saved as metadata in Mail Merge?

[JJ]

I have a "feature" that occurs sometimes after mail merge
(form letters):
Word saves all the merged field's fielcodes as metadata in
document(I did not believe it until I checked this from a
text editor) and sometimes the merged data is
automatically replaced by the old fieldcodes. This
happends irregularry, ie. when removing a section break
from the end of the document. This is kind of a irritating
problem, because there is a risk, that you send important
documents, where the field codes have replaced the
content. Is it possible to prevent the field codes to be
saved to the merged document / or to prevent this kind
of "feature"? I'm using Word97 and an excel document as
data record. I appreciate any kind of help I can get.

Thanks,
JJ

 

[Cindy Meister -WordMVP-]

Hi Jj,

I've never seen or heard of this. I don't currently have a
copy of Office 97 installed... But if you save as RTF format,
then re-open, does the problem still occur?

How about if you copy everything EXCEPT the last paragraph
mark to a new document?

I have a "feature" that occurs sometimes after mail merge
(form letters):
Word saves all the merged field's fielcodes as metadata in
document(I did not believe it until I checked this from a
text editor) and sometimes the merged data is
automatically replaced by the old fieldcodes. This
happends irregularry, ie. when removing a section break
from the end of the document. This is kind of a irritating
problem, because there is a risk, that you send important
documents, where the field codes have replaced the
content. Is it possible to prevent the field codes to be
saved to the merged document / or to prevent this kind
of "feature"? I'm using Word97 and an excel document as
data record. I appreciate any kind of help I can get.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jan
24 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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[JJ]

Hi,

Thanks for the tips. But I have tried these and they don't
work. Saving the doc in RTF-format still saves the same
field names as metadata and the same kind of behaviour
occurs. The section break in the end is always added by
mail merge and after removing that section break the
problem occurs.
Copying in this situation is difficult, we have many
documents and documents contain footers and headers and
the merging is a part of a VBA-code.
I think, that this must be some kind of a bug, and it may
be related to history of these docs, although I have
repeated this with a completely new merge doc. One thing I
forgot to mention is, that sometimes the data is replaced
by the field code names only in headers. Anyways I think,
that it might be best to replace the mail merge
functionality by docvariables.

JJ