Microsoft Office Forums - View Single Post - [Solved] Text merge different text in Excel

macropod · 04-25-2014, 02:06 PM

I suspect the truncated records to which you refer contain more than 255 characters.

Some background: When the mailmerge OLE DB provider used by Word gets data from an Excel column with mixed data types, it has to determine the data type for each column. The first 8 records are used for that (the 8 can be changed in the Windows Registry, but it’s not advisable to do so). Records that don’t conform to the determined data type are liable to not be handled correctly. To complicate matters, for historical reasons, there are two text data types: "text" (up to 255 characters) and "memo" (can be longer than that).

Some common mailmerge issues arising out of this include:
• Numbers but not text or dates being output for some records; and
• Text data being truncated at 255 characters.

Ideally, one would ensure each field has only one data type. Workarounds include:
• Inserting a dummy first record containing data in the format that is not being output correctly; or
• Reordering the data so the first record has content in the format that is not otherwise being output correctly.

Thus, if numbers appear but text and/or dates don’t, ensure the first record for that field has text or a date. Similarly, if text over 255 characters is being truncated, ensure the first record for that field contains more than 255 characters.