Mail Merge NIGHTMARE

[Liz Hopkins]

Using Word '03 on XP machine. Printing across network*
to HP d135 served on ME machine.

My mail merge document takes 10 minutes or more per 2
page letter to print.

Tried moving file to ME machine but Word's
incompatibility with even other versions of Word
prevented that. I didn't even get characters in the
printout when I did that, just ribbons of apparently
randomly distributed black ink.

I tried to work around this "issue" by merging to
separate document using the "edit individual letters"
option. However, Word now refuses to print the new
document and crashes every time I try. I even tried
cutting and pasting into a new document, but it STILL
wouldn't print.

Is there a patch for this? I'd really like to have one
week that isn't massively extended by Microsoft's
hideously buggy (or should that be "issue"-ey
or "undocumented feature" laden?) software.

*for now. We're going to have to move the printer to my
machine, essentially totally reconfiguring our very small
network in order to deal with this "issue," something I
really wanted to avoid having to do.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP - DELETE UPPERCASE CHARACT]

I think that this is probably more of a network printing issue than
mailmerge. I assume that you have tried executing the mailmerge to a new
document and then print that document. If you have a problem that way, it
is not a mailmerge issue as the document produced by executing a mailmerge
in that way is no different from a document that you could create manually.

--
Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Liz Hopkins]

Thanks for getting back to me

I tried merging to a new document. I even tried merging
to a new document and then copying and pasting into
another new document. The computer still flat-out
refused to print the new document. Other network print
jobs do not do this. It's definitely the mail merge.

I agree, it shouldn't be different, which is why this is
such a weird problem.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP - DELETE UPPERCASE CHARACT]

What happens if you try and print the mailmerge main document?

Did you reply to the original thread (which is what you should do) or is
this newsgroup not threading the replies correctly?

--
Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[RWN]

Not an expert, but;
Do you have the printer driver installed on the local machine?

At work we have multiple versions of Word/Os's and anytime we've had
print problems it was when the printer driver was not installed on the
machine.
These problems manifested themselves in many ways (garbage print, wrong
trays selected etc etc.).