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  • Excel - Word could not re-establish a DDE connection to MS Excel.

    From swbjunkmail@gmail.com@21:1/5 to Jonathan Williams on Fri Jan 24 16:48:37 2020
    On Friday, September 22, 2000 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-7, Jonathan Williams wrote:
    Hey folks, 

        Got a werid one here.  I
    have a user who is unable to complete a mail merge.  The data source is an excel file.

    Error reads:

     

    Word could not re-estblish a DDE connection to
    Microsoft Excel to complete the current task

     

    The only knowledge base article I could find that
    relates to this issue is #Q113705.  It didn't help.

    The user is able to merge other documents just
    fine.  And if she decreases the size of the file the merge completes fine.  In other words, the original file has 4481 rows, but if she breaks the file into 4 separate 1000 rows files the merge completes.  User is running Office 97 SR-2 on an NT 4.0 SP4 box.  I have also tested the operation with the same results and I am running Office 2000 on a Win 2000 Pro
    SP1 box.  Any Ideas?

     

    Thanks

    Jay

    I experienced the same problem. I read several tips that I tried to no avail. Of course the "confirm File Format" needs to be selected in Word (File, Options, Advanced, General, Confirm File Format). And using the OLE DB Database will not carry over the
    Excel formatting (a terrible workaround to this is formatting your data in Excel to "Text" which may mean you need to manually re-enter your data - ugh).

    BUT - I found that my Excel files TYPES were being saved as "Excel Workbook" and my Word file TYPES were being saved as "Word Document." When I changed the file types to: "Excel 97-2003 Workbook" and "Word 97-2003 Document" I found the merge worked! It
    brought over the data in the proper format from Excel to Word! :)

    I was elated to learn this after losing hours in research for this problem, then hours reformatting for the terrible workaround to use the OLE DB Database. Those of us who are avid Word/Excel mergers need the DDE to work - and this works. Cheers!
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  • From James W@21:1/5 to swbju...@gmail.com on Mon Jul 11 13:40:37 2022
    On Friday, January 24, 2020 at 7:48:38 PM UTC-5, swbju...@gmail.com wrote:

    BUT - I found that my Excel files TYPES were being saved as "Excel Workbook" and my Word file TYPES were being saved as "Word Document." When I changed the file types to: "Excel 97-2003 Workbook" and "Word 97-2003 Document" I found the merge worked! It
    brought over the data in the proper format from Excel to Word! :)

    I was elated to learn this after losing hours in research for this problem, then hours reformatting for the terrible workaround to use the OLE DB Database. Those of us who are avid Word/Excel mergers need the DDE to work - and this works. Cheers!

    One of my users had the same issue. Your post pointed me to the right direction. The user tried to merge .xlsx into .doc and got the DDE error. After converting .xlsx file back to .xls file, he is able to merge the two. Thank you! James

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