Work around to the merge field limit

[Jill]

There is a limit of 250 merge fields per Word Merge
document. I am working with Word 2002 against an Access
2002 table. Is there a way to get around the 250 limit?
I've heard you can concatenate some of the fields in
Access into one field using commas then use this field
when merging.
Does anyone know how this exactly works and how you write
the merge in Word for separating out the fields to the
correct place?

Thanks for you help.

 

[Evelyn]

Change your field to Memo rather than Text field in the
design view of your data table

 

[Peter Jamieson]

There is a limit of 250 merge fields per Word Merge

document.

As far as I know, this limit only applies to certain data sources and/or
connection types. So if you can export more than 250 fields to a plain text
file (perhaps tab-delimited) or use code to construct a Word document with
tab-delimited records, you may be able to exceed this limit. However, I
don't have the info. on specific limits in Word 2002 in this area, and you
may also find that there is a similar (or perhaps even lower) limit on the
number of fields Access is capable of exporting.

Access into one field using commas then use this field
when merging.
Does anyone know how this exactly works and how you write
the merge in Word for separating out the fields to the
correct place?

Not really, but my guess is that either
a. people use it to reduce the field count by fairly small numbers, e.g.
perhaps they concatenate all the address items they need into a single
field - that might reduce the field count by 5 or so. Since the Word "field
language" has no facilities to split fields up again, it would only make
sense to concatenate fields that did not need to be split up. Or
b. people concatenate the fields and pick a delimiter that does not appear
in the data, then use VBA and Word's MailMerge events to split the field and
insert the results directly into the mail merge main document. That seems a
viable approach to me if you are in a position to do VBA development.

The only query I have is whether you actually need more than 250 fields /for
each merge/. If each merge actually only requires a subset of the fields in
your table, you could create an Access query that just extracts the fields
you need and use that as the data source for the merge.