What does "a field calcuation error occurred..." mean?

[judyk]

I am trying to merge data from an Excel spread sheet that I did not create. I
have tried everything I know (I am not an expert in Excel) to make sure the
columns of information I need are in "Text" so the merging will be easier,
but I still get the message "A field calculation error occurred in record x".
I am not doing any calculations...the information still merges correctly, but
this error message pops up for each field I merged! HELP!

 

[Peter Jamieson]

A number of different things can result in this error. Do you have many
fields in your document? If you save your original document, then start
removing the field codes one by one, do you reach a point where the merge
suddenly works? If every record in your data source is causing the problem,
you could also reduce the number of records to one or two to make testing
easier and quicker. If the error is only occuring for /some/ records, maybe
there is still a problem in the data, e.g. double-quote characters or other
"unusual" characters in the data.

Peter Jamieson

 

[judyk]

Thanks for your suggestions, but (1) there are only 3 merge fields, and (2)
I've done the "one at a time" merge field and each one brings up that error
message. The Excel spread sheet was originally produced by our Controller, so
I had to take out all of the formulas she used and input the data as "Text"
(according to the Help documents); as I mentioned, the merge works....I just
get that error message for each of the three fields!

So, again, thanks for trying, but still the same.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

This is certainly not how it should be!

The other obvious things I would do are:
a. create a completely new document from scratch and see if I can connect
to that data source and merge just one field without problems. You might
also try creating a completely new normal.dot.
b. create a completely new data source (in Excel, at first, but I might
just create a "simpler" data source such as a comma-delimited text file) and
test it with your existing Word document.

If you find that (a) works, there is probably some form of corruption in the
Word document and you should recreate it from scratch.If you find that (b)
works, there is probably some form of corruption in the Excel workbook and
you should recreate it from scratch. If neither works, there must be another
problem.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?anVkeWs=?=,

I am trying to merge data from an Excel spread sheet that I did not create. I
have tried everything I know (I am not an expert in Excel) to make sure the
columns of information I need are in "Text" so the merging will be easier,
but I still get the message "A field calculation error occurred in record x".
I am not doing any calculations...the information still merges correctly, but
this error message pops up for each field I merged!

Which version of Word is this, BTW?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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