Just learnt something new!

I’d inserted the following symbol into various parts of my document

I wanted to change one of them and for some reason I double clicked it which displayed the symbols dialog

This is much easier than having to delete it and insert a brand new one again

I’m not sure if this is a new Word 2007 feature or if it works in Word 2003 but it’s something I hadn’t come across before!

It’s weird how people panic when something is slightly different to how they expect

I client called me this morning as she was trying to do a mail merge but it was behaving differently to how her other mail merges work

Basically when she opened the Word document with the mail merge in, Excel also opened at the same time. She was able to view the data and make any changes she needed while doing the merge

This didn’t happen with the other merge

I was initially a bit boggled by this but then noticed as Word was opening the Excel file the status bar indicated it was trying to send DDE messages

DDE is an old technology that allow Windows programs to share data. Previous versions of Word used to DDE as part of the mail merge process.

The default method for Word 2003 (which is what she was using) is to use OLEDB, allowing Word to “talk” directly to the Excel file

You can change this behaviour though

Click on the “tools” menu and select “options”. Then click the “General” tab and put a tick in the “Confirm conversion at option” box. When you create a new mail merge and point to an Excel file it ask you how you want to talk to it and are able to select DDE

I later found out the original mail merge was set up many years ago and the problem she having was with a brand new merge, which is why she’d not seen this before

She could have done her merge using OLEDB but she was in such a panic as the file hadn’t opened that she thought there was a problem

The mail merge actually works fine using both methods but because it wasn’t working as expected she thought there was a problem

Also as a side note…as well as spotting the DDE commands I also noticed a difference in the warning message when opening the Word document

When you open a Word document (as of XP SP3) that talks to external data you get a warning message

Opening this document will run the following SQL command:
SELECT * FROM your datasource
Data from your database will be placed in the document. Do you want to continue?

Details on why this happens and how to disable the prompt (if you want to) are in this KB article

825765- You receive the "Opening this will run the following SQL command" message when you open a Word mail merge main document that is linked to a data source

The DDE based mail merge showed the following SQL command

SELECT * FROM C:\ExampleFilePath\ExampleFile.xls

whereas the OLEDB based merge displayed

SELECT * FROM ExampleSheetName$

This was when I realised the problem was to do with how the data was being retrieved which then led me onto the DDE thing

All good in the end!

I was asked to look at something by a friend yesterday

She was doing a mail merge using Word 2007 with an Excel spreadsheet as the data source

One of the fields was a date and was in the British DD/MM/YY format on the spreadsheet but when she did the merge it was in the US MM/DD/YY format (It also had the time on the end as well)

My initial thought was that I just needed to tell Word to change the format of the merge field but couldn’t see anywhere on the mailings tab to do that

Then I found this KB article

304387 – Date, Phone Number, and Currency fields are merged incorrectly when you use an Access or Excel data source in Word

Basically the underlying data source stores the date as a number and applies what ever formatting you need (if you have any Excel experience this wont be a shock!)

So when it get’s passed through to Word for use in the merge it then applies it’s own formatting

To change the formatting do the following

Find the merge field you want to change and right click it. Then click the “Toggle Field Codes” option

It should change it so it looks something like this (if the merge field is called “Birthday”)

{MERGEFIELD Birthday }

You then have to change the field to tell it you want a specific date format

{MERGEFIELD Birthday \@ "dd/MM/yy" }

The case is really important here

M means “month” whereas  m means “minute”

You can tweak the format as you need for example “dddd dd MMMM yyywy” would give you Friday 3 October 2008

I’ve tried this in Word 2007 but the KB article says it applies to Word 2003 as well

The KB article also points out how can change currently and phone numbers using the same technique

I know Office 2003 is “sooooo last season” but i get asked about this quite a lot thought i’d stick it on here

When you open Word document attached to an e-mail the reading layout is displayed. Some users don’t actually realise the view is supposed to help them read the document on screen.

What normally happens (especially if the document has pictures/diagrams) is that the user thinks the document has been poorly laid out and they close Word straight away

Quite unfair on the author wouldn’t you say?

So to change this behaviour open Word, click on the TOOLS menu and select OPTIONS

When the options dialog is displayed select the GENERAL tab and uncheck the ALLOW STARTING IN READING LAYOUT option (top right)

You can still select reading layout if need be but when you open a document from now on it will open in the standard view (usually page layout view?)