Word 2007 and Excel Merge Cause Lockup

[PCHomepage]

On a Windows XP Professional system running Office 2007, one particular mail merge seems to consistently lock up Word. It almost seems related to the document itself since other merges do not have the same problem but creating it afresh does not help. I can open the Word document, and select Review Results but when I start scrolling through, it always locks between the 9th and 10th record if it hasn't done so sooner. Thinking there might be some oddity in the record itself, I used the arrows to move to the last record, then stepped forward. Again, it locked between the 9th and 10th. If I try to preview all records, it also locks. I've tried recreating the documents from scratch but no improvement so far. It actually an MS-Access database I want to merge from but that's where the problem began so I switched to Excel only as a test. There are no errors messages whatsoever.

So far, I tried running winword.exe /r to repair the registry entries and I tried running winword.exe /a to disable all plug-ins and add-ons but neither made any difference.

Any ideas? I saw other postings about this problem but none seemed to have been resolved. Thanks.

Don P

 

[macropod]

Hi Don,

Have you tried repairing Word (Word Options|Resources|Diagnose)?


Cheers
[MS MVP - Word]

 

[PCHomepage]

Yes, I ran it several days ago and it didn't show anything out of the ordinary but I'm running it again just to be sure. Thanks for the idea.

Don P

 

[macropod]

Hi Don,

Have you tried using a different data connection method? Word has a number of different methods of connecting to mail merge data sources, including DDE and OLE DB. Word 2002 and later use the OLE DB coonection by default, though you can change this (to DDE, for example).


Cheers
[MS MVP - Word]

 

[PCHomepage]

Good idea and it had crossed my mind to create an ODBC datasource but I was not able to do that because the files need to be exchangeable with other staff and none would be able to access it if I were to create a datasource that existed only on my local PC. I don't have access to create a global one, although it is something I can look into. It might be a good test, though, to do it locally to see if it helps.

In the meantime, I'll try DDE to see if it makes a difference even though I have not had to use anything other than the default for other merges. The is not a large amount of data either, which makes the prblem very strange indeed!

Don P