Fill-in field limit

[Lupe]

Hi,
In a post from 2005 I read that a fill-in field has a 255 character limit.
I have created a merge Word document where the persons have to enter several
values to be merged. They have to enter comments of interviews they held with
several persons and I have created fill-in fields for these comments. But
some of the comments are longer than the 255 character limit. Is there
another way that I can do this?
Regards, Lupe

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I suspect the only ways to do it are:
a. Have two FILLIN fields rather than one and get your users to leave the
second blank if it is not needed. Or maybe if they use a special character
in the first FILLIN to indicate that they need a second FILLIN, you could
use an IF field to display the second FILLIN only when necessary.
Unfortunately because of a limitation in the IF field, you would probably
need to put such a special character at the beginning of the first FILLIN -
e.g. a space

{ SET f1 { FILLIN part1 } }{ REF f1 }{ IF "{ REF f1 }" = " *" "{ FILLIN
part2 }" "" }

Not very nice, but it seems to work. I don't know of a way that would let
you strip off the special character.

b. use VBA and the Mail Merge Events to display a user form or a sequence
of inputboxes during the merge to capture the data and stuff it in directly
into the mail merge main document. I don't have sample code for that but it
should be feasible.
c. capture the data in your data source prior to the merge, rather than
doing it during the merge. May or may not be a sensible way to work.