Hi,

I have a mail merge with a lot of conditional fields that I did up to amalgamate 3 different letters into one. To my surprise, it actually worked perfectly, until I tried to feed it a reasonably sized list of clients. The information used by the merge are:
-Client name
-address
-city


-postal code
-hydro utility
-appliance
-appliance kWh metering
-appliance kWh standard

What the conditional fields are doing is deciding what strings of text to use in the body of the letter. Originally there were three letters, one for clients whose appliances were metered (hereafter referred to as "status 1"), one for those whose appliances were too new to warrant metering (hereafter "status 2"), and those whose appliances qualified but could not be replaced (hereafter "status 3").

The first 2 conditional fields check if they are status 3, because the status 3 letter cancels out most of the body. Where I'm having problems is the third conditional field, which checks if they are status 2.

If I have a small spreadsheet of recipients, everything goes fine. It builds the right letter for each of the 3 statuses. But if there are more than 11~ recipients in the list that are not status 2 before a status 2 appears, then it breaks down and builds the status 1 letter. I have attached the letter and problem spreadsheet, and the debug spreadsheets I've used with the letter.

Any help is greatly appreciated, even if someone can just confirm that this problem doesn't occur in later versions of Office.

Thanks,
Gabe

Attached Files

	Mailout list test.xlsx (18.0 KB, 7 views)
	No Ex Mailout list debug.xlsx (17.9 KB, 7 views)
	rejection letter upload.docx (19.6 KB, 7 views)

Hi Gabe,

The issue appears to be that your 'Reason' column has mixed data types - numbers and text.

When Word performs a mailmerge, it analyses the datasource to try to determine what kind of data each field contains. It does this by looking at (IIRC) the first 16 records. If they're mostly numeric, Word may treat the entire field as numeric, in which case any text records get treated as if they are 0s. You can work around this by either:
• inserting a number of dummy text-only records at the top of the worksheet;
• sorting the worksheet so that the text-only records appear at the top; or
• inserting another column into the worksheet that uses formula to turn either the numbers in the affected column into text (eg =IF(ISNUMBER([@Reason]),"NA",[@Reason])) or the affected words into numbers (eg =IF([@Reason]="Too New",9999,IF([@Reason]="TRC",8888,[@Reason])), then using that column and its values for the condition evaluations in the mailmerge.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

That fixed it, I'll just add the format change to my sorting macro in excel. Thanks a ton!