nonbreaking space

[George Lagger]

The cell in my data source file (excel) contains a nonbreaking space symbol,
but on merging (DDE) it is replaced with an ordinary space symbol. Is there
any way to retain the original symbol (nonbreaking space)?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Not easily. Your best bet (and I haven't tried this particular thing) is to
try to convert your Excel table into a Word table (e.g. use Edit|Copy in
Excel then Edit|Copy in an empty Word document). At that point you should be
able to see if the non-breaking spaces have been retained. If so, then you
may be able to retain them in a merge (if necessary - perhaps cut/paste into
Word is all you need) by using a trick in your Mail Merge Main document -
normally, to merge a column named "xyz" in the data source, you need a {
MERGEFIELD xyz } field, but if the data source is a Word document, you can
sometimes get away with using a { REF xyz } field or just { xyz }, and if
that works, the formatting applied to the original text is normally
retained.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Klaus Linke]

Perhaps you also should complain to MS. The non-breaking space is defined in all
the relevant encodings (MS code page 1252, ISO8859-1, Unicode), so there's
really no reason why Office should mess with it.

Greetings,
Klaus

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Yes, it's interesting that these characters, and leading/trailing spaces
survive if you get the data via an ADO Recordset, which suggests that
a. OLEDB passes them through
b. they are are stripped/transformed somewhere in Word's
Mailmerge.DataSource object

Peter Jamieson