Find in Field Tool Options

[Victor Lazlo]

How would I set options for the Find in Field tool in the Mail Merge toolbar.
Currently when I do a search for say "BPM 656" th e tool "finds" and
displays the first occurence of BPM. I would prefer the tool button to
display a result that matched the entire string,i.e. BPM 656.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

In my expierience, this tool has never been particularly reliable (which is
probably why I don't use it).

In a simple case here using a Word data source, what happens is that when I
look for "BPM 656", Word tells me it can't find it, but moves to record 2
anyway, which happens to have another code starting BPM<space>.

If I click on the Edit recipients button, close the dialog box, /then/ use
the Find Entry tool, Word finds the correct record, no problem, which
suggests that Word can't find stuff properly until it loads it into some
internal buffer. It wouldn't surprise me if this behaviour was different for
other types of data source, either.

If you try the Edit Recipients approach and it appears to work, be careful:
depending on the data source, that box can take a long time to fill, and it
only holds a limited number of records (1000 or some such). It may well be
that Word would then only find the records that it has loaded. But I haven't
experimented further and perhaps once the initial find works, subsequent
finds work properly.

Peter Jamieson