SOLVED: Skipped records in Word Mailmerge from Excel data ..

PROBLEM

An insidious error can occur in Office 2003 SP3: Word Mailmerge skips
some records when merging from Excel data source using the ODBC
driver. No regular pattern, nothing obviously wrong, and may not even
be caught unless careful attention is being paid to the count of
records in the result set. Testing a subset of the worksheet
(selected key columns) merge OK in test, with no skips. There are no
messages in Event Viewer.

Excel worksheet is not excessively large -- 519 x 38 = 4,152 cells,
including header row. Extract of the worksheet to separate workbook
doesn¡¦t solve the problem. Editing the .odc file and changing the
MaxBufferSize 2048 „³ 4096 doesn¡¦t fix it.

SOLUTION

Trimmed the Notes field to 255 characters or less.

DISCUSSION

The Notes field at the end of the record (last field) on two of my 518
records was longer than 255 characters. This appears to be a
limitation of either MS Query or the ODBC driver itself.

However, there is a workaround which does not involve trimming field
contents. In the listing of Mail Merge Recipients, instead of
selecting ¡§All¡¨ select instead ¡§nonblank¡¨ for one or more of the key
fields. This appears to change the query string in some way that
either ignores the 255-character limit or includes the record with
possibly blank data for the offending field(s) (did not check this
result). In either case it forces all the records to be included in
the result set. Not pretty, but it works to get the answer without
editing field contents.

ƒÞ Roy Zider