Hi =?Utf-8?B?Q2hhcmxpZW1hYw==?=,
I've just checked with another attempt, the excel sheet is not locked or
read only. The laptop has been wiped and Office 2000 is a clean install. But
the problem continues.
I'm still convinced this isn't a Word issue, but something to do with the OS
and/or network. I'm going to "think out loud" about Word-Excel mail merge, and
perhaps something will ring a bell with you and lead you to the source of the
problem...
In Office 2000, the default connection method Word's mail merge uses for an
Excel data source is DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange). This is an old technology
(been around for well over a decade), and there are increasing problems with it
that appear to be based in Windows. There are cases (individual machines) where
it is so slow as to be useless. I had a machine like that, once, with multiple
partitions; the problem occured on the partition with Win98, but not under
Win95.
More recently, the message that a DDE connection could not be established is
being seen increasingly. In this case, Word is timing out (or Excel or Access
options have been set to ignore DDE requests - you might want to check that in
Tools/Options).
There are, for Office 2000, two other connection methods available for Excel:
ODBC and Word's internal text converter. Activating the "Select method" checkox
in the "Open data source" dialog box will allow the user to choose. One of
these usually work when DDE does not. The major drawback is that date and
number formatting in Excel are not carried over into the mail merge, so
formatting switches may be required in the merge fields.
Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org
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