Mail Merge is slow

[David French]

I am having trouble with a mail merge
I'm using Windows 2000, Office 2000 with all the latest service packs.

We have the original document which has our Color logo at the top and a
bitmap signature at the bottom. The letter is 954KB. It is saved as a Word
2000 document.
The Excel document we are using as a data source has 2172 lines (records)
and is 409KB.
When I go to merge the status bar counts up to 419 and waits a couple
minutes. It then counts up to 838 (by the way that's dble) and waits again.
Then it counts up to 1257 which is 419 more.

By the time it's done the resulting document Form Letters 1 ends up with
over 4000 pages.

I should only end up with 2171 pages! What's up with this crazy
multiplicity!?!?

Any good ideas would be welcome.

Dave French

 

[Cindy Meister -WordMVP-]

Hi David,

Hard to say without seeing the result document (and no, I don't want you to
send it to me). What's been duplicated? Or are you getting empty or partial
pages for some records?

Note that this is almost certainly a separate issue from Word merging 419
records per "spurt". This is more likely a memory / temp file / spooler
question.

I am having trouble with a mail merge
I'm using Windows 2000, Office 2000 with all the latest service packs.

We have the original document which has our Color logo at the top and a
bitmap signature at the bottom. The letter is 954KB. It is saved as a Word
2000 document.
The Excel document we are using as a data source has 2172 lines (records)
and is 409KB.
When I go to merge the status bar counts up to 419 and waits a couple
minutes. It then counts up to 838 (by the way that's dble) and waits again.
Then it counts up to 1257 which is 419 more.

By the time it's done the resulting document Form Letters 1 ends up with
over 4000 pages.

I should only end up with 2171 pages! What's up with this crazy
multiplicity!?!?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jan 24 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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