I've now looked round all the discussion forums here, noting that its a
common problem, and noting the common fixes. Just to let you know what I've
tried in vain:

1) Ticking 'Confirm Conversion at Open' seems to have no effect to anything
- when I open the document I get no confirmation alert or option screen.. am
I supposed to?

2) Padding out the first row in my Excel sheet with 400character paragraphs
does nothing to aid the truncation - when viewing that record 6 out of 12
fields show 255 out of the 400 characters of the paragraph, and the other 6
show nothing.  The second record is still truncated.

3) Setting TypeGuessRows in the Jet registry entries to 0, in order to get
Excel to look at all the rows does nothing, and when I make 50 rows brimmed
with 400character paragraphs, it still does nothing.

So... what should I do??!

Thanks,
James

This limit on character count depends on a number of things including the
type of connection you make, so you may be able to do what you need by
changing that.

However, if you want to get away from arbitrary limitations in the data
source, you could put your texts in a Word file, bookmark each one with a
different name (e.g. "text1", "text2" etc.), and put the bookmark name in
your data source instead, e.g. in a field called "Mytext". Then use a nested
field such as

{ INCLUDETEXT "c:\\mergedocs\\mytexts.doc" "{ MERGEFIELD mytext }" }

where all the {} are the sort of special field braces you can insert using
ctrl-F9.

You can do something similar using AUTOTEXTs.

Peter Jamieson