Mail Merge Options

[Pannaga]

Hi,
I have a Siebel application where I am doing mail merge between MS Excel
(2002) as source into word (2002). The idea is to extract data from Siebel
into a excel(2002) sheet and use mail merge to create documents which can
printed or mailed.The mail merge happens through a DCOM.
There are two naggiing problems
1. The number of columns limitaion is of 255. I have already used 254 of
them and need have more columns.
2. Some times the execel instance that gets created during run tim doesn't
gets killed even after tha mail merge is complete.
- I was thinking to change the source to a dat file instead of excel. I
would apreaciate your insight into the issues or challenge you foresee with
this.
- The second option I am tying explore is to upgrade to Excel 2007 which has
bigger number of columns. Since this is a relatively new version, I have
aprehensions about it.
Any insight or advice would really help.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Do you have an ODBC driver or OLE DB provider for your Siebel system? (Is it
Oracle-based?) If so, does it let you access more than 255 columns? (As far
as I am aware, it is the individual driver/provider that imposes the maximum
column count, not ODBC/OLE DB itself). If so, can you create the view you
need in Siebel/Oracle and use that directly as the data source.

- The second option I am tying explore is to upgrade to Excel 2007 which
has
bigger number of columns. Since this is a relatively new version, I have
aprehensions about it.

Excel 2007 does support more columns. But at the moment none of the methods
that Word can use to connect can use more than 255 of them. The ACE ODBC/OLE
DB provider (it's a new version of the Jet provider) has not been updated to
take account of the increased column count.

- I was thinking to change the source to a dat file instead of excel. I
would apreaciate your insight into the issues or challenge you foresee
with
this.

Unless you have a particular kind of .dat file in mind, you probably mean a
..txt (.csv) type file. Word can work with .csv files with large numbers of
fields, but it can only do so using its text converter method. (Word has
three ways to connect to such a file - the converter, ODBC and OLE DB. But
ODBC/OLE DB use the same Jet/ACE driver/provider that is used with Excel,
and it is also limited to 255 columns). The problem with using the text
converter is that if Word cannot recognise the field and record delimiters
you are using, it wil pop up a dialog. It often does not recognise them, and
there is no other way as far as I know to specify the delimiters in this
case. (I suppose you might be able to use SendKeys to the dialog box). So
all I can suggest is that you try it with some sample data from your system
and see what happens.

I wish it were more straightforward...

As far as I know Microsoft is aware of the 255-limitaiton when working with
Excel 2007 but I have no idea what their plans are in this area.

Depending on what you are trying to achieve and what technical skills are
available, you might be better off considering an approach that simply
generates the XML of the Word 2003 or Word 2007 document you need. I say
"simply" - in my experience it's not simple at all. But as I understand it,
it should be rather simpler using the .NET framework version 3 and Word 2007
than it has been in previous versions.

Peter Jamieson