Office 2003 - Mailmerge from Excel hangs/crashes

[ufischer]

-Office 2003 Student & Teacher Edition
-Windows XP SP2
-Dell Inspiron 4150

I am in the process of merging an excel spreadsheet into a telephone
directory document in Word. The spreadsheet is only 21 columns by 267 rows.
Word hangs every time at various points of the mailmerge. The most common
way it hangs is as I am going through the various records in the spreadsheet
from either the toolbar or the wizard. But it also hangs at other times such
as by changing the data source.

I do not get any error message. Just the hourglass forever. Only way to
get out of it is by ending the WINWORD process from the task manager or from
the non-responding app dialog. When the crash/hang occurs CPU utilization
jumps to 90-97%.

I'v tried repairing the Office install to no avail.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ufischer]

Well, nobody responded but I ended up figuring out the problem. It looks
like some kind of bug since it occurs at both my home and office
installations. For the sake of anyone that runs into the same proiblem, here
is what I found.

If the last field is a MERGEFIELD with a "\b" switch, the merge hangs every
time. the "\b" switch allows you to specify text to be entered before the
field text only if the field is not empty. It is quite convenient so this is
a bummer. I have other MERGEFIELD fields using the "\b" switch in the
document which had no impact. It looks like it occurs only if the final
MERGEFIELD has the switch.

My workaround was to ise an IF command to test for blank fields for the
final filed of the document. It works fine.

This is pretty wierd so it would be nice if someone else tried to reproduce
this error

 

[Victoria]

This is possibly my problem. I do have a \b in my last field. I'm going to
give it a try and see if it is the problem - thanks for posting this!

Vickie