When Word 2002 uses an Excel worksheet as a data source, it tries various
different ways of connecting to the worksheet.

First it tries "OLEDB". if it can't connect using that (and there are
various possible reasons why) it usually pops up a "data link dialog box".
But you don't seem to be seeing that.

If OLEDB didn't work, it tries "ODBC". The dialog you describe is the ODBC
dialog, and you have to try to make sure that your database is the one
selected from the drop-down (because it may not be selected at this point).
Unfortunately that's not easy because you usually cna't see the full
pathname in that little box. I sometimes move files into afolder such as
c:\a for test purposes so I can see what's going on. In the ODBC dialog box,
you generally don't see anything until you click the Options... button -
then just select all the checkboxes and your worksheets should then appear
in the list.

If ODBC didn't work, it tries DDE. You would see yet another dialog box with
"Entire spreadsheet" in one of the text boxes if you got that far.

Chances are that the reason Word isn't succeeding with OLEDB is that the
workbook is already open in Excel (close it) or is corrupt. If it's corrupt
and not complex (for example, just has tabular data and no formulas) you can
try exporting each sheet to a .csv format then reconstructing the workbook
by re-importing them.

The chances are that record 15 or 16 has a field containing a double-quote
character " (e.g. you might have someone's height in inches in there). As a
workaround, you may be able to wrap that field in double-quotes if it isn't
already, and double up the double-quote.

Or there may be some other "unusual" character in there such as a carriage
return.

If you can't get Word to connect to Excel and you don't have more than 63
columns in your worksheet, you could try copying/pasting your worksheet into
a blank Word document instead, and use that as the data source.

Peter Jamieson