Mail merge involving memo field over 255 characters

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Brian - 22 Apr 2004 05:31 GMT

I am using a mail merge with an Access database as the data source. The one memo field I am trying to merge has many records that have well over 255 characters, but it appears that Word (2002) is truncating the merged data at 255 characters. How can I merge a field with records over 255 characters?

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Cindy M -WordMVP- - 22 Apr 2004 17:59 GMT

Hi =?Utf-8?B?QnJpYW4=?=,

> I am using a mail merge with an Access database as the data source. The one memo field I am trying to merge has many records that have well over 255 characters, but

it appears that Word (2002) is truncating the merged data at 255 characters. How can
I merge a field with records over 255 characters?

Word 2002 (just checking, because the problem is usually with 2000)? What connection
method are you using? And if you sort the recordset so that the longest entry is the
first record, does that make any difference? Just how many characters are "well over
255"? Is it also more than 65,000?

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

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply in
the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

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Brian - 04 May 2004 18:01 GMT

1. This is Word 2002
2. Setup was
Main Document Type -> Letter
Open Data Source -> pointed to query in my Access D
Insert Merge Fields -> the affected one is a memo field in Access; correctly displays full text in Access tabl
3. Setting longest to first did not hel
4. Maximum length is perhaps 1200 character

Uh-oh. In getting back to this, I just realized that the data is also truncated in the query itself. The memo field in the table correctly shows the entire text, but the query truncates it to 255 characters. Do I need to post this in an Access forum?

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Cindy M -WordMVP- - 05 May 2004 08:40 GMT

Hi =?Utf-8?B?QnJpYW4=?=,

> Uh-oh. In getting back to this, I just realized that the data is also truncated in the query itself. The memo field in the table correctly shows the entire text,

but the query truncates it to 255 characters. Do I need to post this in an Access
forum?

Yes, if you're seeing only 255 characters in the Access query result, in Access,
you should go to an Access forum.

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

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

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Brian - 21 May 2004 19:06 GMT

Just an FYI to anyone else needing the answer to this. I found out that this was occurring because I was using Totals in my query and had the default "Group By" clause on the memo field in question. "Group By" returns only the first 255 characters: I changed the clause from "Group By" to "First", and it now returns the entire contents of the memo field.

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Cindy M -WordMVP- - 23 May 2004 09:53 GMT

Hi =?Utf-8?B?QnJpYW4=?=,

> Just an FYI to anyone else needing the answer to this. I found out that this was occurring because I was using Totals in my query and had the default "Group By" clause on the memo field in question. "Group By" returns only the first 255 characters: I changed the clause from "Group By" to "First", and it now returns the entire contents of the memo field.

Thanks for posting this :-)

Cindy Meister

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