Mail Marge to printer doesn't print

[d2c]

With MS office 2000. I merge to printer and it shows that it is mergin
pages at the bottom of the screen but nothing is sent to the printer.
open the print queue and there is nothing there. Sometimes I just hav
to restart Word or the PC to fix the problem, but it's gettin
annoying. Any suggestions or solutions would be appreciated

 

[Peter Jamieson]

A few thoughts:
a. if you merge to a new document, does that always work? What happens if
you try to print the result?
b. does it make any difference if you enable or disable background printing
in Word Tools|Options|Print
c. does this problem affect /all/ merges, or just /some/ merges?
d. are you printing via a network? If so, is the network always available
when you merge? Are there any constraints on the size of the print file
created (e.g. if you are printing via a server, could it be running out of
space or could some other resource be scarce) ?

Peter Jamieson

 

[d2c]

I haven't tried merging to a document, because we are dealing with d
files of 10,000 plus. I have background printing off because it seem
to spool better that way. It is on some not all merges. I usuall
restart word and it fixes the problem. I'm not using a network either
but it is a high speed industrial laser printer that I'm spooling to,
don't think that should make a difference. One thing that I noticed, i
that I had the same problem with another PC and both are using the sam
Word software installed from the same cd. Maybe there's a problem wit
the software

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I haven't tried merging to a document, because we are dealing with db

files of 10,000 plus.

OK, from a Word perspective, I would say that is "large." I don't deal with
that kind of volume here and I suspect most of the regulars in here don't
either.

Although I am told by large-scale Word users that the product is capable of
dealing with large documents (several hundred/thousand pages of text)
without running into difficulties, those people are not usually producing
documents using Mailmerge, and different considerations may apply.

In particular, each mailmerge results in a single print job. Even if you are
printing individual letters via mailmerge, Word does not send each letter as
a seaprate job to the printer - the entire merge of 10,000 pages (or 20,000
if your letter has two pages) is in a single job. That job has to be
processed and stored by your print spool subsystem (in whatever format is
being sent to the spooler), and it is possible that it is running out of a
resource.

Also, you may find that mailmerge grinds to a halt because of various memory
or resource-related issues that have nothing to do with the print spooler.
Fr example, if you use formatted bullets in a mail merge data source, the
chances are that output will grind to a halt quickly.

What to do depends on whether you are just trying to get this merge out of
the way (if so, do it in parts of several hundred records at a time and
accept the manual slog) or are trying to set up an efficient system for
regular large-scale merges. In the latter case, you'll need to determine
what the first limiting factor is (I'd probably start by merging to an
output document and seeing how long it took to grind to a halt, or how many
records I could safely process per batch), then workaround that, then look
for the next one, and so on.

Sorry to be rather vague, but IME it's difficult to try to get a handle on
performance problems unless you have the offending system to hand.

Peter Jamieson