Mail merge error occurs when filtering Excel data source

[Dave]

A customer is using an Excel 2000 workbook with approximately 5600 records,
to perform mail merges to letters and labels in Word 2000.

The customer is attempting to filter the data using the merge helper and
create a merge based on a specific city and state. When the merge is
initiated, the following error message appears;

“Word could not merge the main document with the data source because the
data records were empty or no data records matched your query options.â€

I have reviewed the Excel workbook data and cannot see a problem with the
fields or records that would prevent the merge. In addition, we have
completely uninstalled and reinstalled Office 2000 believing that there was
the possibility Word was not extracting the data correctly from Excel.

If anyone has any suggestions or a resolution, I would appreciate the input.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

After the user has specified the conditions, is the user able to preview
more than one record?

Which connection method is being used? (DDE, Excel converter, ODBC)

What are the selection criteria the user is inputting?

Can you find out exactly what SQL Word is generating from those criteria?
You may be able to do that either by going into the VBA editor and using
immediate mode to Print ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.QueryString, or
perhaps saving the mail merge main document as an HTML file, then opening it
as a plan text file (so you can see all the HTML tags) and looking for a
block of information near the beginning of the file that specifies the
mailmerge options etc.

Peter Jamieson