Word Mail Merge Freezes when previewing directory

[vbnut]

I'm creating a mail merge directory pulling records from Excel. I'm using
Word 2003 and Excel 2003. There are about 230 records I'm trying to merge.
One of the last fields I'm trying to merge is a large field often with more
than 250 characters in the field. Not all of the records have data in all
fields. For some reason when I am previewing the directory with the mail
merge wizard, all of a sudden it just stops, shows an hourglass and I hear
the hard drive on my PC fire up like it's working really hard and it just
freezes. I tried this on a laptop as well and the same symptoms. When I
remove the last field from the merge document it seems to behave fine. I'm
thinking it's data-related but can't find the culprit data. Any ideas?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I tried a data source with around 500 rows and 255 columns , the last one
with texts over 255 characters, and everything was OK (although sometimes a
little slow) here (no matter how I connected to the Excel sheet). So it's
not a universal problem.

However, I have experienced this kind of behaviour in the past - I just
don't know what causes it.

Personally, I would probably do a number of experiments, for example
a. try to rebuild the sheet from scratch (it may not be easy in this case
because exporting to .csv and re-importing may not work with the memo
fields, and exporting to (say) HTML format may preserve the problems as well
as the data). You could also try merging from the exported HTML.
b. search for problem content by successively clearing 50% of the cells in
the last column (e.g. remove the data in the last 115 records, then test. If
that works OK, try starting from the original and remove just 68. Otherwise,
start from the original and remove the first 115. But it's probably worth
keeping the first 8 cells in the column intact, or Word may not guess the
data type of the column properly).