Lost data source

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Wraithchilde - 16 Nov 2006 14:51 GMT

Some of the older mail merge docs I work with ceased to function when the
company implemented the corporate office 2003 update. When opened, I got a
message that Word couldn't find the data source (even though it was still
obviously there). I've had to choose the data source over again for more than
100 mail merge letters. That worked out ok because I knew which tables to
choose.

My big problem is some of these were done by someone else, there is no
documentation on them, and even though I know which database to go to
(because I can se it in the error message) I don't know which table.

So, is there any way to find out which table these letters were previously
set up to function with?

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Doug Robbins - Word MVP - 16 Nov 2006 17:08 GMT

If the "error message" that you mention concerns running an SQL query, see
the following Knowledge Base article:

"Opening This Will Run the Following SQL Command" Message When You Open a
Word Document - 825765 at:

http://support.microsoft.com?kbid=825765 test

Signature

Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

> Some of the older mail merge docs I work with ceased to function when the
> company implemented the corporate office 2003 update. When opened, I got a
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
> So, is there any way to find out which table these letters were previously
> set up to function with?

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Wraithchilde - 17 Nov 2006 15:35 GMT

Thanks for the reply. The link is apparently broken, at least for now.

That's not the error I got. The error was:
<Letter> is a mail merge main document. Word cannot find its datasource.
<path to datasource>

This happened on every mail merge document opened after upgrading from
office 10 to office 11. Every single mail merge document was essentially
ruined. The irony of this is that the <path to datasource> it showed in the
error message was valid.

The problem here is that I was give two options:
1. Find data source
2. Options

In Options I got two options:
1. Remove Data/Header source
2. Remove all merge info

Notice how all 3 options blow away the old data. Nice of Microsoft to give
me such workable solutions.

What I eventually had to do, because this was production critical, was go to
the IT lab and set up a PC with Word 2002 on it, open every mail merge
document (hundreds of them) and run this VBA to get the old queries from each
letter.

Debug.Print ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.TableName

After I got this information I was able to then open all of the documents
(again, hundreds) in Word 2003 and set up the data sources correctly. So, the
problem is resolved, but not because of anything Microsoft did to help.

Yeah, you can probably tell I'm a little angry about wasting an entire day
fixing something that wasn't broken.

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