MS Word / Excel 2011 for Mac catalog merge mystery

April 15, 2013 3:21 PM

I have a batch of mixed-format data including long-form text fields, hyperlinks, number and plain text in an Excel doc. I have assembled a Word catalog merge file intended to allow me to proof the data manually. There are 42 records. On merge, the output document results in what appears to be the correct number of pages and records. However, records 28-42 do not appear to place any data in the destination document.

Due to the length of the long-text fields, which include commas, straight quotes, and tabs, a roundtrip export to plain text is impractical as a quick fix to strip a spurious character from the final 16 records.

I suspect that record 27 or record 28 contains a hidden character that is causing word to stop parsing the data. Record 27 appears to be complete in the merged file.

Any suggestions on fixes? Thanks!

posted by mwhybark to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Response by poster: I ended up isolating for the bad records and creating several different merge docs which I then printed in the correct order.
posted by mwhybark at 4:00 PM on April 15, 2013