Many things, even "heavyweight" server databases such as SQL Server, will
limit you to 255, 127 or 63 columns.
Earlier versions of Word (say, 2000 and earlier) could quite happliy deal
with tab- or comma-delimted text files with thousands of fields. However, it
is touch and go in Word 2002/2003 whether they will work. This is probably
because Word 2002/2003 try to deal with international character encoding
issues, and try to determine what character set is being used, and sometimes
size alone appears to cause them to make a mistake.
You can /try/ putting your data in a delimited format (typically
comma-delimited or tab-delimited) in either a plain text file or a Word
document. If you use a plain text file, you may need to check Word
Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversions at open", then make sure you
select the "Text files (*.txt)" option when offered. But
a. there is no guarantee it will work
b. you will definitely need to avoid using the delimiter character (e.g.
"," or tab) in your data fields, or ensure that fields are enclosed in
double-quotes if you do, and that double quotes within the data are doubled
up. e.g. if you had three fields a,b,c with data as follows
a: abcd
b: e,"f
c: ghij
you should try using the following layout
a,b,c
"abcd","e,""f","ghij"
Peter Jamieson
