Mail Merge has stopped working

  • Thread starter Thread starter Stephen Glynn
  • Start date Start date
S

Stephen Glynn

Office 2000 Professional on Windows XP home edition.

I'm half-way through printing a flyer using an Access query as my data
source. It's been behaving perfectly well until now; suddenly, though,
it doesn't seem to be able to find any records when it tries to merge.
I can see the records in the main document and navigate to the the
ones I want to merge, but when I try to merge anything to file --
including, now, the whole mailshot -- I just get an error message saying
either the data source was empty or Word couldn't find any records that
matched my criteria, which is nonsense.

Any ideas what's gone wrong? I've not done anything to the main
document or the data source since yesterday, when it appeared to be
working fine.

Steve

--


"It has been said," he began at length, withdrawing his eyes
reluctantly from an usually large insect upon the ceiling and
addressing himself to the maiden, "that there are few
situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and
without any loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or
by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a
precipice on a dark night."
 
You might try reconnecting to the data source.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
or checking to see if somehow a filter entry was made (query options in the
mail merge process) that is producing your Null Set of records.

Kate in Mi
 
Thanks. I've tried both those, but with no effect.

Indeed, I've been doing some further investigations and am now more
puzzled than I was before. First I shut everything down, opened up
Access and used the Wizard to create a new mailmerge document based on
the query from there. I put in the appropriate fields, tested it, and
everything worked fine. I then, however, cut and pasted my text over
from the original mailshot and got the same problem.

I think what's happening is that something starts to go wrong when I use
'Find Record' to navigate to a specific record and try to start
merging from there.

A couple more things I've noticed that may be relevant. When I flick
from record to record using 'view merged data', the record number
changes but the screen doesn't refresh. I have to turn 'view merged
data' off and then back on again to see the record whose number is
displayed. Also, when I shut Word down and reopen it I find myself back
at the last record I had on the screen, which I don't think ought to
happen -- doesn't the document normally open at the first record?

One more (related?) oddity. I noticed one of the names was misspelled,
so I edited it in the Access table. Despite closing everything down,
reopening Word and reconnecting to the database I'm still getting the
misspelling in Word. Most strange.

Steve
 
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