Maximum number of characters in a word merge field

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Tom Becker - 27 Jun 2007 09:44 GMT

This is probabaly an easy one for you guys but its driving me crazy.

I have a word merge supplied by excel, some of teh excel cells have quite a
lot of information (upwards of 200 characters), some of the text contained
therein merges where in other sections with the same length the text is cut
off. WHY?

When i tested it it all worked fine, now it does not I can't work out why.

Anty help would be gratefully appreciated, ca't provide a copy of teh
spreadsheet and word doc as its work sensitive.

Tom

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Doug Robbins - Word MVP - 27 Jun 2007 09:50 GMT

From information posted by a fellow contributor, Peter Jamieson, I
understand that Word
looks at the first 8 or so records in the data source to determine the type
of data. If there is no field in any of those 8 or so records that contains
more than 255 characters, that field in all subsequent records will be
truncated at 255 characters.

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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

> This is probabaly an easy one for you guys but its driving me crazy.
>
[quoted text clipped - 11 lines]
>
> Tom

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Tom Becker - 27 Jun 2007 12:16 GMT

Doug,

Thanks, but (and I may be being retarded here) I tried making the first
merge field about 1,000 characters long (which I could then delete) but it
still does not wok, even more oddly it did work for one field and not for
another, however all formatting is the same.

Tom

> From information posted by a fellow contributor, Peter Jamieson, I
> understand that Word
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
> >
> > Tom

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Peter Jamieson - 27 Jun 2007 13:38 GMT

Just to clarify Doug's message, each column is treated separately. If column
A has text <=255 characters in the first 8 rows (typically), column A will
be treated as a "string" and any text in that column will be truncated to
255. If column B has even one text >255 in the first 8 rows the column
should be treated as "memo".

My on this issue are at http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk/t0003.htm but I don't claim
that it is the complete picture, especially if you are using an older
version of Word than (say) XP/2002, or your worksheet was created in an
earlier version of Excel.

Peter Jamieson

> Doug,
>
[quoted text clipped - 32 lines]
>> >
>> > Tom

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