Header Record Delimiters fails . . .

[Ward]

to recognize my field delimiter and record delmiter. The field delimiter is
a double quote and the record delimiter is the paragraph mark. However, the
dropdowns for both fields do not give me the option to select either of these
field delimiters? The preview pane shows the the fields in double quotes
with a paragaph marker at the end of each entry. How do I fix this problem?
Thanks.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

If you really mean that " is the field delimiter, e.g. you have a file like

field1name"field2name"field3name
record1"Peter"blah blah
record2"Jamieson"blah blah

then I do not think you will succeed because as far as I know you cannot
choose " as the field delimiter whether you connect to the data using Word's
converter (which asks for the field and record delimiters), ODBC or OLEDB.
As far as I know there is a built-in assumption in all three methods that "
is, if anything, a "text delimiter".

So I think you will have to change that. IMO a tab character is often the
best option - even if you have tabs in your data, you can surroung the
fields by "" and you should be OK. Not completely straightforward if you
want to use ODBC though.Tilde ~ is sometimes a good choice too.

As for the paragraph mark record delimiter, typically Word will recognise it
correctly but in its dialog box it will probably preselect (enter) for you.
ODBC only recognises "enter" (i.e. CRLF in MSDOS/Windows systems, although
it might recognise CR alone or other combinations - I'm not sure). I think
OLEDB is the same.

If you are using a separate header record it's usually best to double up the
header line.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?V2FyZA==?=,

to recognize my field delimiter and record delmiter. The field delimiter is
a double quote and the record delimiter is the paragraph mark. However, the
dropdowns for both fields do not give me the option to select either of these
field delimiters? The preview pane shows the the fields in double quotes
with a paragaph marker at the end of each entry.

Because doublequotes are often used to designate that what is between them is
the literal field content (in case it would contain, for example, a paragraph
mark), I'm not surprised that doublequotes aren't allowed as field delimiters.
Try a TAB, a semi-colon or a comma.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Ward]

The problem was with the merged document itself. I opened my Word template
and pressed Alt-F9 and removed the double quotes surrounding the merged
fields. This fixed the problem.