Word/Excel and DDE issue?

[Kim]

One of my users is trying to perform a mail merge to
create labels. From Word, she chooses Tools/Mail
Merge/Labels. At the second step, where you indicate the
data source, she chooses Open Data Source to an Excel
document, which is on the network. She finds the Excel
document and chooses it, and then the process hangs. At
the bottom is a message "Initiating DDE Link with MS
Excel" but it appears that the link never occurs. At this
point, in task manager Word shows as "Not Responding" and
I have to close Word through Task Manager.

When I set her up as a user on my computer and try the
process, it works fine.

W2K/Office 2000

Any suggestions on how to remedy this?

TIA
Kim

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Kim,

One possibility would be to simply wait it out, and see if
the DDE finally gets a response back. Some machines can be
slower than molasses when it comes to DDE in mail merge
(seems to be a Windows thing). I had a machine like this,
once, and just had to avoid DDE with mail merge in order to
get any work done.

Another would be to try a different connection method
(activate the "Select method" checkbox in the Open Data
source dialog box, then test ODBC and Word's internal
spreadsheet converter).

Possibly, the issue is with permissions (or lack thereof) in
the network location. If the data file is first copied to the
local machine, is the DDE connection successful.

One of my users is trying to perform a mail merge to
create labels. From Word, she chooses Tools/Mail
Merge/Labels. At the second step, where you indicate the
data source, she chooses Open Data Source to an Excel
document, which is on the network. She finds the Excel
document and chooses it, and then the process hangs. At
the bottom is a message "Initiating DDE Link with MS
Excel" but it appears that the link never occurs. At this
point, in task manager Word shows as "Not Responding" and
I have to close Word through Task Manager.

When I set her up as a user on my computer and try the
process, it works fine.

W2K/Office 2000

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

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[Kim]

Thank you Cindy. I chose a different conversion method,
and that seemed to work. Thanks again.

Kim