Word/Access Merge Problem - Help!!!!

[Mohican]

I have a perplexing problem with a Word/Access merge. The Word main document
is connected to an Access query. Once the connection was established, the
Word document was saved to preserve the DDE link between the document and
query. However, when the user tries to perform the merge, a dialog box
appears asking if the user wants to find the data source. Even when you
navigate to the data source and save the document, the next time the user
opens the document, the same problem occurs. Bottom line is that it will not
hold the link on that user’s workstation. Please consider the following
facts:

The user has been doing this merge for an extended period and this is just
now a problem.
Other users on the network can perform the merge with the exact same files
with no problem.
We tried re-installing MS Office on the user’s workstation and the problem
still persists.
We resolved the problem by re-imaging the workstation.
Workstation OS – Windows XP Pro
Network Client - Novell
Word Processing – Word 2003
Database – Access 2003
Both the document and the database are stored on the network server.

I now have the exact same problem with another user with a different Word
document and Access query. I would really like to avoid re-imaging if
possible. Do you have any suggestions?

 

[Lara]

I had a similar problem a while ago and it turned out that the Word document
only remembered the link to one user at the time e.g. when user 1 established
the link, user 2,3,4 (on different workstations)... lost it and for user 2 to
establish it meant all others in turn lost it.

If I remember rightly I gave each user their own copy of the mail merge
document as well as the data to be merged.

The latter can be done via a make table query (or a combination of delete
query and append query on a specifically designed table if you don't want to
loose formatting of fields) to get the data from the server onto the Front
End portion of the DB on each workstation (assuming that not everyone uses
the Front End from the Server)

This way the data gets pulled from the server every time you run a mail
merge and the link just stays the same for each user.

It might also help by using ODBC links instead of DDE but not 100% sure and
I can't test it for you currently as I am not onsite...
Hope this helps

 

[Mohican]

Lara,
Thank you very much for your quick response. I am out of the office, but
will try your suggestion when I go to work this morning and let you know how
it goes.