save Excel worksheet changes after Word 2000 mail merge

[Pat Faller]

I use mail merge in Word 2000 and prefer having my data on
Excel worksheets. I use a few of these worksheets to
merge the same data into several form documents (letters,
forms, labels, etc.). Sometimes when I go to merge
another document after adding or changing an entry on the
worksheet, the newly opened worksheet doesn't show the
changes I made previously. Other times the changes do
appear and I haven't figured out what controls this. I
even saved the document separately from inside while the
new entries are displayed and the save doesn't "take" -
Windows Explorer still shows the save date and time of an
earlier save. [Even if I save it with another name,
sometimes it saves and sometimes it doesn't show up on
Windows Explorer (i.e., it "disappears").] However, it
the "saved" spreadsheet that doesn't seem to be directly
accessible or findable will reappear if I open a different
Word document that was created with mail merge. This is
really frustrating.
I do some of my mail merges on documents that I
create "new" from a template with the merge fields in it.
Could this be the problem?

Is there some way to control this? What am I doing wrong?

 

[Cindy Meister -WordMVP-]

Hi Pat,

I'm not completely clear on how you're working, but...

If you open a number of Word documents linked to the same
Excel worksheet, they will all be putting "file locks" on
that xls file. And this means that the documents you opened
later are probably "seeing" a static, read-only version of
the worksheet. So any changes you make to the data list in
the worksheet will probably show through into one, but not
the other merges.

Best practice would probably be:
1) Open only one main merge document at a time
2) Save any changes made to the worksheet before opening the
next main merge doc
3) You might (note MIGHT) get better results if you use ODBC
to link to the Excel file.

It's important to keep in mind that Excel is a file-based
application, not a database. So it won't offer you the same
flexibility as a database.

I use mail merge in Word 2000 and prefer having my data on
Excel worksheets. I use a few of these worksheets to
merge the same data into several form documents (letters,
forms, labels, etc.). Sometimes when I go to merge
another document after adding or changing an entry on the
worksheet, the newly opened worksheet doesn't show the
changes I made previously. Other times the changes do
appear and I haven't figured out what controls this. I
even saved the document separately from inside while the
new entries are displayed and the save doesn't "take" -
Windows Explorer still shows the save date and time of an
earlier save. [Even if I save it with another name,
sometimes it saves and sometimes it doesn't show up on
Windows Explorer (i.e., it "disappears").] However, it
the "saved" spreadsheet that doesn't seem to be directly
accessible or findable will reappear if I open a different
Word document that was created with mail merge. This is
really frustrating.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jan
24 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow
question or reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail