Get pages of blank table cells, w/first page only populated thoughincorrectly ... (?)

[ngmail]

I'm sorry, this is probably so basic but I'm having the devil of a
time. Word is quite unintuitive when it comes to merging <sigh>.

I create a Word doct with a table and some rows. I placed the usual
word merge fields, taken from the source Excel document with data.
When I merge the doct., Word takes some time and generates over 100
pages with everything after page 1 being the same main table but with
blank rows. Only the first page is correctly populated, though it has
a bunch of blank rows since I think I have more rows than the total
number of records in the Excel doct. (checking ... 19 rows of data in
Excel, over 40 rows in Word).

I've been reading and reading posts in the archives via Google but I'm
just no closer to a solution.

I've checked and re-checked the Excel sheet, the print area is tight
around the data and no empty rows are in the print area. I have this
type of setup in the Word table rows:

«LAST_NAME» «FIRST_NAME» «Home_Telephone» «Home_Telephone» «Next
Record»
«LAST_NAME» «FIRST_NAME» «Home_Telephone» «Home_Telephone» «Next
Record»
«LAST_NAME» «FIRST_NAME» «Home_Telephone» «Home_Telephone» «Next
Record»
«LAST_NAME» «FIRST_NAME» «Home_Telephone» «Home_Telephone» (very
last row and very last cell, without «Next Record», results come out
the same)

I've tried all the suggestions I could find in the archives, i.e.,
putting NEXT word field at the beginning of each row after row 1, but
when I go to select the Word field, nothing gets dumped into cell. I
get all sorts of other commands to be dumped, but NEXT refuses to get
into the Word merge file.

I end up with hundreds of pages of blank tables with only the first
one having some data in it. I don't know what's going wrong and am at
my wit's end <g>.

Does anyone know what is going on by my description above and what can
be done? I'd greatly appreciate the help. When I do regular merge
letters, they seem to come out okay. There just seems to be something
weird happening with the tables.

Thanks! D

 

[ngmail]

Woops, that's just a copy-paste error, the field is not duplicated.
Each line actually reads like this:
«LAST_NAME» «FIRST_NAME» «Home_Telephone» «WORK_TELEPHONE» «Next
Record»

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Not sure exactly what you're attempting, but a couple of possible things...

1. If you're trying to create a phone list, you should probably just
change the type of your mail merge main document to "Directory" and have
just one row like

«LAST_NAME» «FIRST_NAME» «Home_Telephone» «Home_Telephone»

with no <<Next record>>

2. Unless you are positively selecting or specifying the Excel name
"print_area" as the data source for the merge, there's no reason to
assume that your records will be constrained to that area. If you are
actually specifying "Entire Spreadsheet" (with a DDE conection, you
should get all the records in the frst sheet in the workbook. If you're
selecting a sheet name in a "Tables" dialog, you get the whole sheet.


Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk