Problem with one quotation mark.

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Alan Olrog - 25 Jul 2008 11:53 GMT

I thought I'd successfully merged an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document.
However, a few cells contain text with quotation marks (") and I see that
where there is a pair there's no problem. Where there is just one (e.g. 19")
it gets confused and concatenates all the following fields up to the end of
the row. Is this behaviour expected? I'm linking with DDE. Any help
appreciated!

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Peter Jamieson - 25 Jul 2008 15:25 GMT

> Is this behaviour expected? I'm linking with DDE.

Unfortunately, yes. If you aren't trying to produce a fully automated merge
for use by someone else, your best bet is probably to replace the " by two
single quotes '' throughout the Excel sheet before you merge.

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Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

>I thought I'd successfully merged an Excel spreadsheet into a Word
>document.
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> the row. Is this behaviour expected? I'm linking with DDE. Any help
> appreciated!

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Alan Olrog - 26 Jul 2008 14:41 GMT

Thanks for that Peter.
I tried looking for Mail Merge rules that prohibited a single quotation mark
but found no warnings. It seems a little odd to me, given that an Excel cell
is allowed to contain text, and that mail merge has no problem with a pair of
quotation marks in a cell.
Do you know if this 'rule' (and any others) is written explicitly within
Word Help or Microsoft Help?
Alan Olrog

> > Is this behaviour expected? I'm linking with DDE.
>
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
> > the row. Is this behaviour expected? I'm linking with DDE. Any help
> > appreciated!

Reply to this Message

Peter Jamieson - 26 Jul 2008 16:53 GMT

> Do you know if this 'rule' (and any others) is written explicitly within
> Word Help or Microsoft Help?

Not as far as I know. You are more likely to find a knowledgebase article
about it (http://support.microsoft.com) although I think in this case the
articles that do exist describe slightly different problems.

It is unfortunate of course that in DDE is "obsoleescent" (i.e. unlikely to
attract any documentation resource at all) when so many people have to use
it to solve other difficulties with Excel data sources.

Signature

Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

> Thanks for that Peter.
> I tried looking for Mail Merge rules that prohibited a single quotation
[quoted text clipped - 26 lines]
>> > the row. Is this behaviour expected? I'm linking with DDE. Any help
>> > appreciated!

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