Selecting recipients doesn't seem to work

[Zahra]

I'm using Word and Excel 2003 for a mail merge. Up until recently, we were
able to select a few recipients and merge only those to a new document or the
printer. Now, I don't know what happened, but we can select recipients, but
Word will merge all records nonetheless. I thought my source was too large,
so I removed quite a number of records to a new spreadsheet. But I'm still
having the same problem. Anybody got an idea of what we're doing wrong?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

As far as I can tell, this will occur if you havemore than 10,000 records in
your data source and you are trying to select individual records in the
MailMerge Recipients Dialog Box, which can only contain 10,000. 9999 records
and you seem to be OK. Of course, some other factor may be at work as well.

The 10,000 limit is AFAIK undocumented by Microsoft. Actually, people have
mentioned similar problems before and I, for one, have never connected this
particular problem to that particular limit. But if it is the 10,000 limit,
you could try submitting a support incident, but I wouldn't hold your breath
for a solution. Personally, I would have thought that a limit that at least
accommodated the maximum number of rows in an Excel 2003 sheet would help a
lot of people and would not cause problems for present-day PCs.

The only other suggestions I can make are
a. apply query conditions /before/ making your selections, but there can be
problems in that area as well.
b. consider the possibility that when you reachthe 10,000 limit, you're in
the territory where MS is pushing you to do things in a different way. Sad
if that's the case but perhaps a nasty reality.

 

[Zahra]

I did not have 10k+ records (more like approaching 2k records). But, I think
we may have applied formattings to some columns that, for an unknown reason,
made the mail merge tool think we had data down to line 65536. I have
selected all lines below 500 and cleared them of all contents. It did solve
the problem completely. Thank you very much!

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Very useful feedback, thanks.