Merge field display error

[Wraithchilde]

I'm doing some merges with over 300 documents and sometimes a few of them
(1-10) will do something really weird. All of the characters pile up in the
merge fields. It looks similar to what used to happen with old dot matrix
printers when the carriage would get stuck and print the entire in the space
of one character.

It's pretty rare so I haven't seen it enough times to notice any patterns.
But it's extremely annoying since I'll have to run 200-300 letter merge over
again.

Has anyone else ever experienced this?

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?V3JhaXRoY2hpbGRl?=,

I'm doing some merges with over 300 documents and sometimes a few of them
(1-10) will do something really weird. All of the characters pile up in the
merge fields. It looks similar to what used to happen with old dot matrix
printers when the carriage would get stuck and print the entire in the space
of one character.

It's pretty rare so I haven't seen it enough times to notice any patterns.
But it's extremely annoying since I'll have to run 200-300 letter merge over
again.

Has anyone else ever experienced this?

I've never seen it in a mail merge result. I (and others) have seen it in
"plain text" in older documents. In these cases, the cause is damage to the
internal binary structures of the document. Sometimes, you can get rid of it by
pasting the text into Notepad, then back into the document. Sometimes, the
entire document text has to go back into a new document. Depends on just where
the damage is.

If you're merging directly to the printer, and this is so rare and
inconsistent, I'd look at printer/network connections as a possible cause.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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