Working with Merge Fields in Word

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

The problem I am having doesn't directly have anything to do with your product, but affects how easy it is to add the merge fields to the base document.

In MS Word there seems to be a limit of 255 items that will display on the drop down list. While that sounds like alot, I have setup merge fields from several different areas of our system. Each has it's own list of fields that can be large. Especially since I am not dealing with a list of used items, but a list of potential items. I have made a merge source in excel that lists all of the potential items to be merged. After 255 they stop. I am not even really happy with scrolling through the list of 255 inserting and then scrolling back down to the same place.

So what is the best way of handling this? I know they could type in the field names or more likly copy and paste them in, but there must be a better way than that as well.

Any suggestions? We are using Office 2007

Randy Miller

TransGuardian

2

Hi Randy,

Thanks for your inquiry.

I'm afraid it's not quite clear what you are trying to achieve in your description. Could you please attach some sample documents which demonstrate your issue and we will provide some further information.

Thanks,

3

It isn't an issue with a specific document, but a problem with MS Word.

If you create a spreadsheet with 300 columns and unique column names. It will only display the first 255 items.

I was just curious if you know of a way around this limitation.

What do you see as the easiest way of creating merge documents in MS Word when dealing with a large number of fields that can be inserted?

Thanks

Randy

4

Hi Randy,

Thanks for this additional information.

I think you can just use a .csv or .txt file as the data source instead to avoid these limitations.

Overall I think perhaps you may want to try restructuring your system so that the list does not need to be so large, perhaps split the document into two or three separate documents depending on the structure.

Thanks,