Mail Mrege on Windows 98 not working

[Richard]

Hi,

I'm trying to do a mail merge on a windows 98 machine installed with Word
2000 for some customers of my company. The merge works fine on other OS
systems that have Word2K,
but on Windows 98 machines Word will prompt me that it can't find
fields in my header source that are in the word document. The only field it
seems to see is the first field. I've manually opened the datasource (it's
just a text file) and verified the fields are there. Also the word doc is
on a
server but my data source is local. I am using a '~' as my
field delimiter, not sure if that might cause problems. Also I setup a
windows 98
machine at my office with word2000 and it merged the files fine. Does
anyone know what I might be missing? Thanks!


Richard

 

[Peter Jamieson]

My guess is that this is a problem where Word tries to use the ODBC text
driver to get its data and fails because ODBC does not recognise the tilde
delimiter. A few things you could try:
a. rename the data source, e.g. using file extension ".dat".
b. replace all the tildes by tabs (e.g. use Word as a text editor)
c. use the ODBC admininistrator (have a look in Control panel) to configure
the text data source so that it expects tilde as a field delimiter for this
file. Although it's probably worth finding out if ODBC is installed and
whether a text data source has been set up, setting up a delimiter in this
way isn't entirely straightforward. However, ODBC just creates/maintains a
file called SCHEMA.INI in the same folder as the data source file, and you
can modify the SCHEMA.INI file directly in Notepad. What you need is a
"section" for your file name and a few items, probably as follows:


[yourfile.txt]

ColNameHeader=True

Format=Delimited(~)

MaxScanRows=25

CharacterSet=OEM


Peter Jamieson

 

[Richard]

Thanks for your reply, I will give these a shot!

My guess is that this is a problem where Word tries to use the ODBC text
driver to get its data and fails because ODBC does not recognise the tilde
delimiter. A few things you could try:
a. rename the data source, e.g. using file extension ".dat".
b. replace all the tildes by tabs (e.g. use Word as a text editor)
c. use the ODBC admininistrator (have a look in Control panel) to
configure the text data source so that it expects tilde as a field
delimiter for this file. Although it's probably worth finding out if ODBC
is installed and whether a text data source has been set up, setting up a
delimiter in this way isn't entirely straightforward. However, ODBC just
creates/maintains a file called SCHEMA.INI in the same folder as the data
source file, and you can modify the SCHEMA.INI file directly in Notepad.
What you need is a "section" for your file name and a few items, probably
as follows:


[yourfile.txt]

ColNameHeader=True

Format=Delimited(~)

MaxScanRows=25

CharacterSet=OEM


Peter Jamieson

Hi,

I'm trying to do a mail merge on a windows 98 machine installed with Word
2000 for some customers of my company. The merge works fine on other OS
systems that have Word2K,
but on Windows 98 machines Word will prompt me that it can't find
fields in my header source that are in the word document. The only field
it
seems to see is the first field. I've manually opened the datasource
(it's
just a text file) and verified the fields are there. Also the word doc
is on a
server but my data source is local. I am using a '~' as my
field delimiter, not sure if that might cause problems. Also I setup a
windows 98
machine at my office with word2000 and it merged the files fine. Does
anyone know what I might be missing? Thanks!


Richard