Formatting Corruption of Mail Merge Documents

[Daniel H.]

In my department I have developed a proposal system that
in alt + F9 (with if thens and field codes showing)
reaches and estimation of 300 pages. Once merged with an
excel spreadsheet, it determines what is need and only
shows the pages that are required. The entire thing is if
thens and field codes. My problem is that over 40 people
use this one programmed document 200 times a day and after
a year it will go corrupt even though their is a security
lock on the files to prevent others but myself from saving
over this proposal. I have made everything in table
format, but it will eventually corrupt and pages will move
to the right or left when merged. Any advance on how to
correct? And how do I maintaine the intergredy of the
document moving forward?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Well, you don't give us much to go on, but here are just some thoughts which
may or may not be stating the obvious:
a. obviously you've put a lot of effort into making this proposal system
work, and it's heavily used. So it's valuable (at the moment, anyway).
b. if you could guarantee that nothing would ever change on these systems,
the maximum you would really need to do is make one or more backup copies
and keep them securely. Then, even if someone modifies the one you keep on
your network, you can always get the original back if necessary.
c. however, something always does change, eventually. Even if no-one needs
to change your proposal system for any business reason, someone may need to
upgrade something else, and all of a sudden your system may need to be
altered. If I were in charge of your department and was relying on your
system for everyday work I'd want to make sure that I wasn't completely
dependent on you being there to make any changes or sort out problems. At
the very least what /I/ would want is to ensure that
- the system (including setup files etc.) was securely backed up
- there was enough clearly written documentation to enable someone else to
work out
- what the system is supposed to do
- how it actually works
- at least one other person knew enough about Word to have some chance of
picking up your work and modifying it.
- if changes are being made on a regular basis, I'd want to be sure that I
could always move back to an older version, and that newer versions were
made available in an organised way.
d. That's the minimum. However, given a reasonable knowledge of Word, I'd
also be concerned that the system, however well it works, may rely on a lot
of hard-won knowledge of how Word fields actually work in practice, and that
even you may begin to forget a lot of that stuff over time. If it looks like
a rat's nest of IF fields etc., it's probably going to be very hard even for
you to maintain. So I'd probably be wondering whether there was a way to
re-implement the entire thing in a way that was simpler to understand and
maintain, and how much effort might be required to do that, and whether I
could really justify it. Technically, in the case of Word, I'd probably be
wondering whether all the IF/THEN stuff currently implemented using fields
might be better implemented using VBA to decide how to put the document
together, and so on.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Daniel,

My 2ç to add to Peter's thoughts:

Save the document as a TEMPLATE (*.dot), to the Workgroups
template location (as in Tools/Options/File locations). The
users should work with it via File/New, so that they ALWAYS
make a copy and never work with the original.

over 40 people
use this one programmed document 200 times a day and after
a year it will go corrupt even though their is a security
lock on the files to prevent others but myself from saving
over this proposal. I have made everything in table
format, but it will eventually corrupt and pages will move
to the right or left when merged. Any advance on how to
correct?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep
30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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