DDE connection problems

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PeteMarley - 15 Apr 2004 16:33 GMT

Can someone please tell me why word fails to establish a
DDE connection when the data source is an XL file?

Mail Merge will work fine with Word files but not XL

OS-> XP Pro using Office 2000, all updates installed.

Many thanks,

Pete

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Cindy M -WordMVP- - 16 Apr 2004 10:53 GMT

Hi PeteMarley,

> Can someone please tell me why word fails to establish a
> DDE connection when the data source is an XL file?
>
> Mail Merge will work fine with Word files but not XL
>
> OS-> XP Pro using Office 2000, all updates installed.

This is a problem that crops up now and again in every
version of Office on some installations. There's a
Knowledge Base article for each version on the
microsoft.com website; ones for earlier versions (say, Word
97) go into more detail than later ones. In summary: if in
Excel's Tools/Options/General the "Ignore other
applications" checkbox is activated, deactivate that and it
may work.

If that's not the problem, then there's not much hope for
being able to get a DDE connection to work on that machine.
Then you'd better use ODBC or Word's internal spreadsheet
converter for the connection. You can choose by activating
the "Select method" checkbox in the "Open Data source"
dialog box.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update
Sep 30 2003)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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:-)

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