Mail merge/double inverted commas problem

[Guest]

Hello,

I am using Office 2000. I have created a merge document in Word that uses an
Excel sheet as its data source.

The Excel data source contains about 30 columns, one column is a list of
products, some of which include entries that contain double inverted commas
(eg. My 48" Product). When I insert this merge field and perform the merge,
records with no double inverted commas are fine, but records that include
double inverted commas are not being included in the final merged document at
all. In other words, I am only getting 359 of 389 records. If I remove the
double inverted commas from one of the records in the Excel sheet and run the
merge again, this extra record appears!

I would be very grateful if anybody could shed any light on this problem as
while trying to solve this I have tried a couple of simple examples where the
data source records include double inverted commas and I am getting some
unusual results in all cases.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?TWFya04=?=,

Probably, Excel is marking the one set of cells as containing numerical content,
and the rest as containing text content. Then passing only the cells containing
the numerical content through to be merged.

You can either explicitly set the column as text, using Data/Text to columns OR
copy the Excel data into a Word document and using the result as the data
source.

I am using Office 2000. I have created a merge document in Word that uses an
Excel sheet as its data source.

The Excel data source contains about 30 columns, one column is a list of
products, some of which include entries that contain double inverted commas
(eg. My 48" Product). When I insert this merge field and perform the merge,
records with no double inverted commas are fine, but records that include
double inverted commas are not being included in the final merged document at
all. In other words, I am only getting 359 of 389 records. If I remove the
double inverted commas from one of the records in the Excel sheet and run the
merge again, this extra record appears!

I would be very grateful if anybody could shed any light on this problem as
while trying to solve this I have tried a couple of simple examples where the
data source records include double inverted commas and I am getting some
unusual results in all cases.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

To work around this, either use two apostrophes in the Excel file or (in
this case, where you seem to be using " for "inches") use an inch mark
instead (the double-prime character at Unicode glyph 2033).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your responses,
I am using Find (double inverted commas) and Replace (with two apostrophes)
in my Excel sheet to solve the problem.

Do you know if there are any other characters that Word does not "like" in a
mail merge?
--
Thanks again,
MarkN

To work around this, either use two apostrophes in the Excel file or (in
this case, where you seem to be using " for "inches") use an inch mark
instead (the double-prime character at Unicode glyph 2033).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?TWFya04=?=,

I am using Find (double inverted commas) and Replace (with two apostrophes)
in my Excel sheet to solve the problem.

I'm not convinced this is going to help, if it's the problem I suspect (mixed
text and numerical content in the same column).

Do you know if there are any other characters that Word does not "like" in a
mail merge?

(single/odd number of) apostrophes
The character you get when you press Alt+Enter

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
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

 

[Guest]

Hi Cindy,

Everything works fine with two apostrophes