Why is merge so slow?

[Steve Forrow]

For many years we have been using DDE commands to produce
mail merge documents using Word95 and Word97. On both
these versions the merged document is produced almost
instantly. We are currently looking to upgrade to
Word2002 on XP and are testing this process which now
takes approximately 1 minute to produce a document. We
have a recorded a macro on Word2002 and debugged it to see
what part of the process is taking the time and it is
the "ActiveDocument.MailMerge.Execute" statement.

During this period Word opens the default "Form Letters"
document, the hard disk rumbles and we wait about 60
seconds before the document appears.

There must be something we can do to speed this up, any
help would be welcome.

The main document is in rtf format, the source data is a
text file with 800 fields, the machine is a pentium III
with 128Mb of RAM.

Versions:
Word2002 (10.4219.4219) SP2
WindowsXP Professional version 5.1 (Build
2600.xpsp.1.020928-1920:service pack 1)

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Steve,

Word 2002 no longer uses DDE by default, but OLE DB. How fast
OLE DB is depends on a number of factors, including the type
of data source. You must use Excel or Access... The former,
especially, will be comparatively slow because there is no
direct OLE DB provider, instead, a general OLE DB provider
has to go through a couple of interfaces to get the data.

You can use DDE, or ODBC (which would probably be even
faster). You'll find details on how to do this in the Word
2002 section of my website's mail merge FAQ.

For many years we have been using DDE commands to produce
mail merge documents using Word95 and Word97. On both
these versions the merged document is produced almost
instantly. We are currently looking to upgrade to
Word2002 on XP and are testing this process which now
takes approximately 1 minute to produce a document. We
have a recorded a macro on Word2002 and debugged it to see
what part of the process is taking the time and it is
the "ActiveDocument.MailMerge.Execute" statement.

During this period Word opens the default "Form Letters"
document, the hard disk rumbles and we wait about 60
seconds before the document appears.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep
30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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