Hi,
I wonder if someone has come across this problem before or knows a work around or a fix please.
Currently I have a number of very large spreadsheets in Excel 97 containing all types of data formats and formulas that I then merge into Word 97.
All works fine without any problems and has done so for the past few years.
We are being forced to upgrade to Excel & Word 2003, due to MS no longer supporting '97 Applications.
The problems I have found when moving from 97 to 2003 are:
1) DATANAMES differ between 97 & 2003, as long DATANAMES are truncated differently and certain characters "()$£%_-" etc may also be dealt with differently.This results in some DATANAME fields having to be re-inserted into documents. I can live with this but many Datanames will have to be re-inserted.
2) When importing the DATA all formatting is lost i.e. 20% shown in the excel spreadsheet will appear as 0.200 in the documents, this affects all percentage, currencies and date fields. Also where "blank" fields would previously just remove that line (i.e. in the address so it appears correct without gaps) we now get a "0" inserted in the line.
3)Another problem is that for some unknown reason when the data is imported it may gain a bit of lose a bit ! Yes I know this sounds bizarre but 15% will be shown as 0.14999999999999 and 27.5% will be shown as 0.2750000000000002. Before you mention the obvious I can confirm the cells only contained "15%" and "27.5%" and a sum had not taken place where there was rounding issues.
The above 3 problems were sent to our IT Dept and they have not come back yet, so I am trying to find solutions elsewhere and get one step ahead.
I have also started a mail merge from scratch with a new Excel 2003 Spreadsheet and Word 2003 Mail Merge Document and the above problems 2) & 3) happen there also !!!
I know that you can change properties on the datanames to do certain things (like add prefixes etc) but this is not really an option as over the several spreadsheets there are many mail merge docs and about 2000+ DATANAMES.
Like it said it is all perfect under 97, and becomes completely useless when it is moved to 2003.
Another thing I discovered is that if I move the DATA SOURCE, being the spreadsheet to the same folder as the mail merge documents, Word 2003 then will automatically find the new location of the spreadsheet and when you first merge all formatting is retained....however you then save the mail merge document to store the new location of the data source, but when you re-open and merge again all the formatting is lost !!!
If anyone can offer any assistance it would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: Sorted it !!! Changed connection method to DDE and now working!!
Diddy
I wonder if someone has come across this problem before or knows a work around or a fix please.
Currently I have a number of very large spreadsheets in Excel 97 containing all types of data formats and formulas that I then merge into Word 97.
All works fine without any problems and has done so for the past few years.
We are being forced to upgrade to Excel & Word 2003, due to MS no longer supporting '97 Applications.
The problems I have found when moving from 97 to 2003 are:
1) DATANAMES differ between 97 & 2003, as long DATANAMES are truncated differently and certain characters "()$£%_-" etc may also be dealt with differently.This results in some DATANAME fields having to be re-inserted into documents. I can live with this but many Datanames will have to be re-inserted.
2) When importing the DATA all formatting is lost i.e. 20% shown in the excel spreadsheet will appear as 0.200 in the documents, this affects all percentage, currencies and date fields. Also where "blank" fields would previously just remove that line (i.e. in the address so it appears correct without gaps) we now get a "0" inserted in the line.
3)Another problem is that for some unknown reason when the data is imported it may gain a bit of lose a bit ! Yes I know this sounds bizarre but 15% will be shown as 0.14999999999999 and 27.5% will be shown as 0.2750000000000002. Before you mention the obvious I can confirm the cells only contained "15%" and "27.5%" and a sum had not taken place where there was rounding issues.
The above 3 problems were sent to our IT Dept and they have not come back yet, so I am trying to find solutions elsewhere and get one step ahead.
I have also started a mail merge from scratch with a new Excel 2003 Spreadsheet and Word 2003 Mail Merge Document and the above problems 2) & 3) happen there also !!!
I know that you can change properties on the datanames to do certain things (like add prefixes etc) but this is not really an option as over the several spreadsheets there are many mail merge docs and about 2000+ DATANAMES.
Like it said it is all perfect under 97, and becomes completely useless when it is moved to 2003.
Another thing I discovered is that if I move the DATA SOURCE, being the spreadsheet to the same folder as the mail merge documents, Word 2003 then will automatically find the new location of the spreadsheet and when you first merge all formatting is retained....however you then save the mail merge document to store the new location of the data source, but when you re-open and merge again all the formatting is lost !!!
If anyone can offer any assistance it would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: Sorted it !!! Changed connection method to DDE and now working!!
Diddy
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