Could not establish DDE connection with Microsoft Excel

[EmmaFairclough]

Hi

Every year we do a rate increase mail shot, I've always used Excel to record all the addresses of our customers and then used word for a mail merge. However this year when i try to 'get data' in word I get the error message 'word could not re-establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Excel to complete the current task'

I know that DDE is a dynamic data exchange but other than that I've no idea what this error message means. I've tried saving the files as *.csv and as *.txt but to no avail. Am I doing something really fundamentally silly or do I have an actual error??

Please help as I am already three days past deadline to get these letters out!!!!

Thanks