Problem with one quotation mark.

[Alan Olrog]

I thought I'd successfully merged an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document.
However, a few cells contain text with quotation marks (") and I see that
where there is a pair there's no problem. Where there is just one (e.g. 19")
it gets confused and concatenates all the following fields up to the end of
the row. Is this behaviour expected? I'm linking with DDE. Any help
appreciated!

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Is this behaviour expected? I'm linking with DDE.

Unfortunately, yes. If you aren't trying to produce a fully automated merge
for use by someone else, your best bet is probably to replace the " by two
single quotes '' throughout the Excel sheet before you merge.

 

[Alan Olrog]

Thanks for that Peter.
I tried looking for Mail Merge rules that prohibited a single quotation mark
but found no warnings. It seems a little odd to me, given that an Excel cell
is allowed to contain text, and that mail merge has no problem with a pair of
quotation marks in a cell.
Do you know if this 'rule' (and any others) is written explicitly within
Word Help or Microsoft Help?
Alan Olrog

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Do you know if this 'rule' (and any others) is written explicitly within

Word Help or Microsoft Help?

Not as far as I know. You are more likely to find a knowledgebase article
about it (http://support.microsoft.com) although I think in this case the
articles that do exist describe slightly different problems.

It is unfortunate of course that in DDE is "obsoleescent" (i.e. unlikely to
attract any documentation resource at all) when so many people have to use
it to solve other difficulties with Excel data sources.