Word 2002 versus word 2000 - mailmerge

[GaryRW]

AHHHHHHH!

I have just discovered a very annoying problem.

I have a quite complicated system set up in office 2000 using access to run mail merges. In Word 2000, if a date field in the database is blank, then the merge field is blank (sounds sensible to me). I then have IF fields which ensure the letter makes sense if the field is blank.

BUT

I have a new user who is running Word 2002. On her machine, if a date field is blank in the database, the mergefield linked to that blank field will instead insert today's date. Hence all my lovingly created IF fields checking to see if the date is blank or not do not work and letters are produced that don't make sense.

I have trawled through Word help but can find nothing about this - I really hope that there is an option about this that I am missing, if not, can anybody suggest anything?

Many thanks for any help that you can give

 

[GaryRW]

I posted the above late last Friday afternoon so I'm hoping that by posting this again, it might draw my plight to peoples attention who may have left the office early on friday...

 

[Rythemton]

Word 2000 used DDE to communicate between programs. Word 2002 uses ODBC. The difference is that DDE sends everything as a text item (for the most part) while ODBC transfers in different formats.

Try comparing to 0 instead of "", this would be my only guess as to what might work, other then changing the format back to DDE (which I don't know how to change this). Theoretically, this should work, because dates are sent as a number in ODBC.

Steve

 

[Dreamboat]

Steve and Gary: Method can be changed by hitting Open data source button, second button on mail merge toolbar. Hit New Source button at bottom of dialog box. Anne Troy
Dreamboat@TheWordExpert.com
Anne@MrExcel.com

 

[GaryRW]

I had a problem also with american/uk dates which it turned out was related, and someone else told me that Word 2002 uses OLEDB, where I had previously been using ODBC. All that I then needed to do was to force Word 2002 to use ODBC (sounds so simple, doesn't it?)

For once I managed to find the answer on the MS web site:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q285332

Hope that helps