# Mail Merge truncating 'some' of the text fields......Not sure what to do



## sssb2000 (Sep 24, 2010)

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.


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## Macropod (Sep 25, 2010)

Hi sssb2000,

When working with a mailmerge, Word queries the first 8-15 rows of data to try to determine each field's type. Your problem may stem from none of the first 8-15 records for the affected fields has sufficient data to alert Word to the potential field lengths.

You might find that inserting a dummy first record with the required maximum length for each field will solve the problem. You might also need to delete the mailmerge header, then re-establish it, for this to work.


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## sssb2000 (Sep 26, 2010)

Macropod said:


> Hi sssb2000,
> 
> When working with a mailmerge, Word queries the first 8-15 rows of data to try to determine each field's type. Your problem may stem from none of the first 8-15 records for the affected fields has sufficient data to alert Word to the potential field lengths.
> 
> You might find that inserting a dummy first record with the required maximum length for each field will solve the problem. You might also need to delete the mailmerge header, then re-establish it, for this to work.



thanks.
each word document that i'm creating is a row in (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?

also, what do you mean by: You might also need to delete the mailmerge header, then re-establish it, for this to work.


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## Macropod (Sep 27, 2010)

Hi sssb2000,

To delete the mailmerge header in Word 2007, renaming the mailmerge data source should be enough to get Word to generate the 'delete mailmerge header' prompt. you can undon the mailmerge data source renaming afterwards. Alternatively, you could try opening your mailmerge main document, then go to Mailings > Start Mailmerge, click on 'Select a different list' then re-choose the existing data source.


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## sssb2000 (Sep 27, 2010)

Macropod said:


> Hi sssb2000,
> 
> To delete the mailmerge header in Word 2007, renaming the mailmerge data source should be enough to get Word to generate the 'delete mailmerge header' prompt. you can undon the mailmerge data source renaming afterwards. Alternatively, you could try opening your mailmerge main document, then go to Mailings > Start Mailmerge, click on 'Select a different list' then re-choose the existing data source.




Thanks,
i'm actually using Word 2002 (sorry).
i did what you said though....i renamed the header from nothing (which made my code F75) to something that was a 1000 characters.  (ie. i put a 1000 character text in BE1)

i also reconnected the excel file (data source) to my mail merge document.

neither fixed the problem. 

any ideas what i'm doing wrong?


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## Macropod (Sep 27, 2010)

Hi sssb2000,

I'm out of ideas, sorry. You might be able to get the help you need via the public MS Word forums at: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordshare/threads


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## sssb2000 (Sep 28, 2010)

ok,
I made it work.  The solution was in line with what was you suggested here as well as several other places i researched.....but it was still a bit confusing when explained.

if the data starts on row 3, and the headers are in row 1, you need to create a dummy row on row 2 (underneath the mail merge header row), and put a bunch of characters (10000) in each cell of that row.  then, save excel, exit.  open word.  reconnect to the new excel file.  then you're golden 

thank you  macropod!


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## mafinlouisiana (Nov 5, 2015)

Just wanted you all to know that I found this post from 2004 because I was having the same problem.  Here it is 2015, I'm using Excel and Word 2013, and your solution worked!  You saved me a huge headache.  Thank you so much.


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