MailMerge missing blank characters

[Tom Bokman]

I'm using Word 2002 and Access 2002 to do a mail merge. Some of the fields
in the database contain 5 blank characters. When I try to print a mergefield
containing 5 blanks on a line by itself, no line is printed and all the lines
below that contain data are shifted up one line. Also if a mergefield from
the database has any leading blanks the output gets shifted to the left as if
the blanks have been removed. Is there a setting that can fix this problem?
Thanks.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?VG9tIEJva21hbg==?=,

I'm using Word 2002 and Access 2002 to do a mail merge. Some of the fields
in the database contain 5 blank characters. When I try to print a mergefield
containing 5 blanks on a line by itself, no line is printed and all the lines
below that contain data are shifted up one line. Also if a mergefield from
the database has any leading blanks the output gets shifted to the left as if
the blanks have been removed. Is there a setting that can fix this problem?

The option to choose whether or not to suppress blank lines during mail merge
can be found in the older interface (the "Mail merge..." dialog box).
Instructions on how to pull these out and put them in your toolbar can be found
in the Word 2002/2003 section of my website's mail merge FAQ.

As to Word trimming blank and trailing spaces: no, there's no way to suppress
this. The only type of data source where Word will NOT do this is when the data
is in a Word table. It should, however, be possible to copy the table (or query
dynaset) in Access and paste it into a Word document. Save, and use that as the
mail merge data source.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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