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General discussion

Mailmerge problem in Word 2003

by piercwc Feb 21, 2006 2:45AM PST

Hi,
I have the following situation:
At my work, mailmerging is a daily routine. Primary documents are being merged with mostly "comma delimited" records.

Up till now we have been working mostly with Office 97 and Office 2000. We recently installed Office 2003 on some new machines.

Documents created for mailmerge on Office 97 and 2000 machines behave very strange in Word 2003.

When merging in Word 2003, the second record and all subsequent records attach themselves to the previous page instead of starting on a new page.

Has anyone necountered this problem before or have a solution for this..

Thanks in advance for any help.

arloss
amsterdam

Discussion is locked

3 Posts
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Re: mailmerge problems
by Kees Bakker Feb 21, 2006 7:18AM PST

What happens if you create a NEW mail-merge document in Word 2003 and merge that with a comma-delimited file?

If that's OK, try to save the old documents as Word 2003 documents, and try again. If it doesn't work either, you've got a more simple 2003-only problem: mailmerge doesn't work at all with comma-delimited files.

Hope this helps and let us know.


Kees

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Thanks very much..
by piercwc Feb 22, 2006 5:16AM PST

Thank you very much for your suggestions and solution.

Seems like the option you offered to save the old document as a Word 2003 document was spot on!

Saving the document and then merging did the trick. So I can say that comma-delimited files is not a problem when merging. I suspect it to be a backward compatibily issue between 2003 and earlier Word versions.

I will keep looking for a more user friendly solution though, for as you can understand, failing to remember to save the file as a word 2003 document beforehand can spring a nasty surprise on the user.

Thanx for your input,
arloss

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You're welcome. Thanks for posting back.
by Kees Bakker Feb 22, 2006 7:18AM PST

By the way, it was just a guess. One gets kind of experienced in troubleshooting doing these forums.

Instruct the users to do a one-time convert-all-my-mergedocuments operation during the Word 2003 introduction course they get. Such a course makes sense anyway: why introduce a new version if nobody will use the new features because nobody knows them.

Kees

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