mail merge in XP not OK in 2000

[koenhofman]

Hi y'all !


I did a merge in word 2002. It's a succesfull one to me coz I can close
and reopen the two docs (word and excel 2002) just fine without losing
my merge.
The thing is , when my colleagues open the word doc in there office
2000 they don't see any merge data, they can see that I inserted some
lines but there's nothing datawise behind them no DDE.



Can anybody help out here?

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Koenhofman,

I did a merge in word 2002. It's a succesfull one to me coz I can close
and reopen the two docs (word and excel 2002) just fine without losing
my merge.
The thing is , when my colleagues open the word doc in there office
2000 they don't see any merge data, they can see that I inserted some
lines but there's nothing datawise behind them no DDE.

By default, Word 2002 does not use DDE. It uses OLEDB, which is new. So
if you give someone with an older version of Word the main merge document
it can't work. You need to set up the merge with DDE, ODBC or Word's
internal converter. You'll find instructions for this in the Word 2002
section of my website's mail merge FAQ.

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

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[Peter Jamieson]

The thing is that when you set up a merge in Word 2002 or later, by default
it uses OLEDB to get the data from Excel. Word 2000 doesn't understand OLEDB
data source connections at all and just discards them (as far as I know).
You could try reverting to using DDE in 2002 by checking Word
Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversions at open", going through the data
source selection process again and selecting the DDE option when offered.
Then see if /those/ Word/Excel files work in Word/Excel 2000.