Missing Field in Mail Merge (Office 2003)

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If I ever open a Mail Merge document that is associated with a data source file and the document calls for a field that is missing from the data source, I can get into the situation where I can’t find any way to cancel out of the merge without stepping through every record even if there are 1200 records. Is there some way to cancel out of that situation?

If this doesn’t make sense I can describe a way to get into this situaiton.

Thanks,
Bill

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I always find taskmgr’s “End task” option to be a useful form of last resort cancelling

A description of a way would be useful.

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Andrew,

Yes, you are correct, that is one way to get out of it. I was just hoping there was “nicer” way that I wasn’t familiar with. I am pretty sure that I did go past the chance to stop or change the problem in the dialog box that Hans has pointed out when I constructed my sample of how to create the problem so I doubt that there is any reason now to outline my steps.

Thanks,
Bill

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There’s usually an option to remove the field from the merge document.

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Hans,

Yes, I’m pretty sure I saw and ignored that escape route (dialog box) in my recent simulation of the problem but I seem to hit this problem every now and then and I’m inclined to doubt that I’ve bypassed that solution every time. In any case, I think I’ll just have to wait and see if I can grab the sequence of events the next time I encounter this problem if I haven’t ignored that dialog box. It certainly seems that the Cancel button on that dialog box would be a reasonable solution when it does show up.

I can remember having the very distinct feeling in the past, where I have changed the name of a previously-unused field in the data source and added a reference to the new field to the Word document, and the merge seems to not know about the change to the data file. My recollection is that after encountering this problem I can refresh things in some way and it all works after that. That is all a memory from several months ago but maybe it is the situation where I’ve encountered this kind of problem. In any case, I’ll keep my eyes open for when I have to step through too many records in order to get out successfully and see if there is a scenario where the dialog box does not help.

Thanks for your help.

Bill

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