Merge errors

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

bhodgins_at_idirect.ca
Date: 02/08/05 

Date: 8 Feb 2005 13:29:18 -0800

Can anyone help me?

We are getting errors when we try to do a mail merge in Word 2003 SP1
with an ASCII file generated in a custom database.

The only field that is giving the problem is the name field, which is
62 characters in length. If I open the text file and shorten the field
name to 39 or less by removing the spaces, everything works fine.

With the problematic list, I am able to select the list, and then when
I click "edit recipient list" I see all the populated fields except the
name field header which looks like this:
<M____________________Name_________#%$>
The "#%$" are actually displayed as chinese characters?.

If I click on this field to "sort by", I get the error "Word could not
parse your query options into a valid SQL string". All other fields
seem to work fine.

If I ignore this and contine, I eventually end up with an "invalid
merge field" error.

I find it hard to believe that Word 2003's merge fields are limited to
39 characters.

Has anyone experienced this?

Cheers,

Brad

Relevant Pages

  • Re: EBCDIC to ASCII file conversion
    ... I've used cygwin and UnixUtils' dd to verify that we can routinely convert further EBCDIC files, and both apps generate the same output for the EBCDIC file supplied. ... All lines in the ASCII file they supplied contain 451 characters, most of which contain zeroes for the 2nd half of the line. ... In the output from dd, there are numerous instances of a left brace, followed by nine 0's, followed by another left brace. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc)
  • Re: How to distinguish between binary and ASCII file on file opening?
    ... "CFF" wrote in message ... > binary and ASCII file to be loaded from hard disk so that different ... The more characters you check, ...
    (microsoft.public.vc.mfc)
  • Re: Recognising file type (ascii/binary)
    ... > characters you can deem the file binary or corrupt. ... > heuristics for guessing the "type" of the file based ... > (And files with 2-byte UNICODE characters can really confuse things.) ... probably isn't a valid ASCII file on any of the above three platforms. ...
    (comp.lang.java.programmer)
  • Re: Words default formatting for .TXT files
    ... a synonym for ASCII file, a file in which characters are represented by ... Contrast with a binary file, ... is no one-to-one mapping between bytes and characters. ... binary files to preserve the formatting. ...
    (microsoft.public.word.conversions)
  • FileSearch FileName using wildcard (?)
    ... Environment: Windows XP SP1 ... I use "???5??.xls" as the argument for the FileName property of ... the FileSearch object. ... limits the files found to files with a name length of 10 characters. ...
    (microsoft.public.excel.programming)