Mail Merge: Text Limitation to 255 Characters? Can I change this?

[Allison Hancock]

I am having problems pulling the entirety of the text in some of the cells in Excel into the Word document while performing a mail merge. I am wondering if there is a limitation to how much text you can pull from Excel into Word, and if I can increase that limitation. It seems like 255 is the maximum number of characters it will pull from Excel.

I have already tried re-copying and pasting the information in the Excel cell.

And I have also tried recreating the entire Excel and Word documents.

Is 255 characters the maximum Mail Merge can handle? Can I change the maximum?

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

Welcome to MrExcel.

What happens if you move the field with the longest text so that it is the first record in your list in Excel?

 

[Allison Hancock]

I moved the record with the longest text to the top of the list, and it was able to pull more then 255 characters into the mail merge for that record and the following 12 records. But anything after the 12th record only pulled the first 255 characters in the cells that had more than that.

 

[Allison Hancock]

And thank you for replying and thank you for the welcome!! I am glad to be a part of this forum. I love Excel!

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

What if you move all the records with the long text to the beginning of the list?

 

[Allison Hancock]

OK, I moved all the records in order of most amount of text to least amount of text and it worked for that subset of data. But I have 11 subsets per record and they differ in text amount from the first subset. Does that make sense?
So the next 10 subsets of data still cut off at 255 characters...

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

I don't know what you mean by a subset, sorry. The principle I have outlined should work for you.

 

[shg]

Andrew, don't you just find it odd that that works?

What if you needed to put all of the big numbers at the top for SUM to work?

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

I think it's to do with how Word determines the data type of the field - String (up to 255 characters) or Memo (over 255 characters). There's loads of info here:

Word: Problems with Excel data sources

 

[shg]

That's an interesting read (thank you), but too complicated to internalize for the mail-merge I do once or twice a year (and have to go through Help every time to complete it).

That said, if there were whole paragraphs to include/exclude, I'd probably automate it in in Word and change styles between Hidden and Visible.