Mail merge – limitation of text?

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Hi,

A colleague of mine wants to insert a piece of text (longer than 255 chars) from Excel into Word in a merged document. Once inserted some of the text is cut of. Our guess is that there is a limit on the numbers of characters that can be transferred across – and that he may have to write in multiple fields.

Is this something anyone can confirm for certain?

TIA

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I have found the same limit (255 characters) merging from Access into Word.

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I found an old knowledge base article discussing a 255 character maximum when connecting via ODBC in Word 2000 (WD2000: Field Text Truncated When Merging or Inserting Database), but the article says it was patched, so at least in theory it should not be a problem in Word 2003.

Glancing at this thread on the Databases forum — Import into Access from Excel using ADO — it appears that the OLEDB plumbing still imposes the 255 character limit, so perhaps you can switch from connecting via OLEDB to ODBC?

Another suggested workaround is to connect using DDE.

Let us know which of these help, if any.

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Hi jscher,

Thanks for the tip. Only problem is that this is directly between Excel and Word, so for now there’s no ODBC source involved.

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Only problem is that this is directly between Excel and Word, so for now there’s no ODBC source involved.

There are 3 ways to connect to an XLS (Excel workbook). Do you not get this dialog when you specify the source file?

Maybe there is an option for that somewhere…

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