Formatting mail Merge Hell

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Kelly - 18 Apr 2006 15:42 GMT

I recently changed from XP to 2003 and now all my mail merge documents are a
problem.

I have tried the switches with limited success and changing 200 Merged
fields in one document one by one it turning out to be quite the challenge.
I still can not get the document to print the two decimal places required for
currency. Zip codes are a challenge. Our item list is a varried list of
Alpha, numeric, - and /. I have had limited success with some of the other
switch entries.

Does anyone else feel that Microsoft has taken a simple easy to use feature
and made it so complicated that you have to be a software engineer to use
this featue?

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Peter Jamieson - 18 Apr 2006 16:54 GMT

The simplest way to revert to previous behaviour is generally to check
Word|Tools|Options|General|Confirm conversion at Open, re-connect to your
Excel data source and choose the DDE option when offered. I suspect you must
have been using that in Word XP as you would probably be having the same
problems.

> Does anyone else feel that Microsoft has taken a simple easy to use
> feature
> and made it so complicated that you have to be a software engineer to use
> this featue?

I certainly thing some changes to the relevant OLEDB providers would have
avoided a lot of these problems.

Peter Jamieson

>I recently changed from XP to 2003 and now all my mail merge documents are
>a
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> and made it so complicated that you have to be a software engineer to use
> this featue?

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