Word 2002 hangs during merge to Excel spreadsheet

[Karen D.]

Hi...

On step 3 of the Mail Merge Wizard, after the user selects
the Excel spreadsheet and clicks through a couple dialog
boxes (detailed below), Word hangs. One user waited twenty
minutes before giving up - on a mail merge to a
spreadsheet with only three rows! This only occurs for
some users, but for those users, Word always hangs. The
same source file (Excel) and template (Word) work fine on
other machines.

Details:
All machines are running Win XP 2002 Pro with SP1, Word
2002 SP 2, and Excel 2002 SP2. Most of them are over 1 ghz
processors and the lowest RAM I've seen is 248. I've had
users close all other open programs when running the mail
merge and it doesn't seem to help.

Error process:

User selects Enable Macros to open the template.The
template opens automatically to the third step of the mail
merge process, with no data source selected. User clicks
Browse, locates the Excel file, and opens it. A Data Link
Properties dialog box appears on the Connection tab. User
clicks OK or Cancel, doesn't seem to make a difference. An
ODBC Driver Login failed error message appears, and the
user clicks Cancel. The status bar flashes that it is
opening Excel and then that it is initiating a DDE
connection, then goes blank. Word hangs at this point.

NOTE: All users receive the Data Link Properties dialog
box and ODBC Driver Login failed message box, but mail
merge works for some of them anyway.

Thanks,
Karen D.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Karen,

Hard to say, definitively, what the problem is, except that
it must have something to do with the macro being enabled.
The steps you describe for linking to the data source are
nothing like the default for Excel OUGHT to be. There are
certainly issues when using Excel (or Access) with Word 2002
mail merge, but this isn't among them.

On step 3 of the Mail Merge Wizard, after the user selects
the Excel spreadsheet and clicks through a couple dialog
boxes (detailed below), Word hangs. One user waited twenty
minutes before giving up - on a mail merge to a
spreadsheet with only three rows! This only occurs for
some users, but for those users, Word always hangs. The
same source file (Excel) and template (Word) work fine on
other machines.

Details:
All machines are running Win XP 2002 Pro with SP1, Word
2002 SP 2, and Excel 2002 SP2. Most of them are over 1 ghz
processors and the lowest RAM I've seen is 248. I've had
users close all other open programs when running the mail
merge and it doesn't seem to help.

Error process:

User selects Enable Macros to open the template.The
template opens automatically to the third step of the mail
merge process, with no data source selected. User clicks
Browse, locates the Excel file, and opens it. A Data Link
Properties dialog box appears on the Connection tab. User
clicks OK or Cancel, doesn't seem to make a difference. An
ODBC Driver Login failed error message appears, and the
user clicks Cancel. The status bar flashes that it is
opening Excel and then that it is initiating a DDE
connection, then goes blank. Word hangs at this point.

NOTE: All users receive the Data Link Properties dialog
box and ODBC Driver Login failed message box, but mail
merge works for some of them anyway.

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

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