Hello all,
i have an excel sheet that i'm using to create 50 or so word documents. some of my text cells in excel are getting truncated (at 256 characters) once brought into word. however, some cells with a thousand or more characters are 'not' getting truncated! bizzare!
i did a google search and found that i need to get the windows 2000 service pack 1 to increase the limit to 50k. but i have windows 2007 on XP! can't get the windows 2000 service pack1! and i already have the latest service pack for 07 anyway.

Any thoughts? I'd greatly appreciate your help.

ps. i've tried opening the excel "via DDE" but i get an error that says windows encountered a problem and has to close.

Word looks at the data in the first record in the datasource in order to decide what you need. I suspect that some of your fields are merging OK because they have more than 256 characters in the first record. Edit the first record so that it has more than 256 characters in any fields that are long for some records.


To do the DDE thing, follow these steps:
In Word 2007...Office Button >
Word Options > Advanced > General > Confirm file format conversion on open
Then close Word and re-open, reconnect to the Excel file and then you will be given the option of connecting via DDE

If you have Window XP, you do not need a service pack for Windows 2000. The problem you are having is a common complaint about mail merge and does not indicate anything about what service packs you have.

Thank you for your reply.
Could you please explain what you mean by the blue text above? (what's a first record?)
Also, i verified and i have word 2002. sorry.
but i did get to your steps and the problem is that once i try to open the excel, word forces itself to close.

A record is a row. The first record is the row of data that is closest to the top of the sheet.

"once i try to open the excel, word forces itself to close"
Why are you opening Excel after Word is open?

ok, each word document that i'm creating is a row (A3:FW55).
one of the cells that's giving me trouble is BE12. it's got like 350 characters and only 255 show up. (there are other cells that have 1000 characters and show up fine).
so, based on what you said, i put in text in BE1 with 500 or so characters. BE12 is still showing up truncated (i reconnected the excel so i know it was updated). is this what you meant i should do?

regarding your question....i'm not opening excel again. i meant that when i click to "link" the excel document to my word, it asks me to open the excel with DDE which i select, and then word says something like: word encountered an error and has to close. and then it forces it to close!

So that I am sure I understand, you're going to do a mail merge 50 times, using one row per document. You have more than 255 characters in some of the 180 columns. When you connect via DDE, you get a error that is something like "word encountered an error and has to close".

Sorry, I don't know how to help. Maybe someone else will. Good luck.