Forum Discussion
Mail merge
mathetesThe short answer is "No". A simple flat file does nothing for me when our production environment is as heavy as it is. SPO stands for SharePoint Online.
If you have to wait 15 mins for something to happen, you'd probably complain too. I was about to throw the laptop at the wall. My personal highlight of that day was ChatGBT helpfully suggesting that I might be better off coding the whole merge in VBA. Don't say that little bot does not have a sense of humour.
Anyway, the largest part to the answer I meantime discovered. It turns out that Word *always* latches on to the the most recent Excel session, and NOT the session with the target database. So ... when that most recent Excel session does not contain that database, Word will launch it again. Which is disaster for two reasons:
1 You won't get the data in the active session, obviously.
2 If the most recent session is heavy - and that it was in my case - the act of loading the read-only copy from disk and calculating it ends in a fiasco. Now, 15 mins easily exceeds the time it should take to calculate even the heaviest of my Excels, but Lord knows what other nonsense that process does. I would not be surprised if it ran single-threaded. Just for fun.
Anyway, the bottom line is that I can get the link-up time down to 2 mins if I make sure that I open the database in a new Excel session. Those 2 mins are still worse than what it was 5 years ago, but hey - that is the price of progress I suppose.
And I could rant about SPO all day long 😉
PS: I also observe that the obscure OLEDB *always* opens a read-only copy of the Excel from disk, so it will never get the latest values from a recalculated template. So the default DDE is the only way for us to go.
Thanks for such a thorough reply. As I noted before, you are clearly very knowledgeable with things Excel. So I wish you well in this....perhaps my having answered, and you having replied, will bring the whole issue to the top of the forum for some other looks by folks with more recent and comparable experience.
mathetesHa ha. I doubt it. I nodded along when you wrote "the really complex stuff was well over 20 years ago". I think mail merge has gone out of fashion. I have not come across anyone using it in this millennium. It is what oldtimers like us still occasionally do 🙂 Probably also the reason it no longer works. Not a focus for MS.
Best.
I'm retired now, in my early 80s, still enjoying figuring out how to do things in Excel, and quite overwhelmed by all the new functions and features. I particularly enjoy the dynamic array functions.
You may be right about Mail Merge. What I recall doing with it that I considered complex was writing a routine that used mail merge to create letters of agreement for employees of a division being sold to another company, and Word had to list variable numbers of benefits that could be (or couldn't be) transferred to the acquiring entity. This would have been in the 1990s...