Does anyone here have experience with merging Excel data into Word documents?  I had one of those days with Office, I would sooner forget.  I have an XLM file – not too heavy, but with OnCalculate VBA – which used to supply data into Word without any problems when we were still using Dropbox and pre-365 environment.  Since moving to O365 and SPO, the Word will happily take 15 minutes over opening the document. 

There is some weird trick by which I can force Word to give up on DDE and switch to something called OLEDB.  It brings the time down to 1 mins – still pretty rubbish.  I talked to my new friend ChatGBT about it and I now know that I am in trouble because, after initially coming up with many helpful suggestions, it in the end referred me to Microsoft Support … 😞

One of its suggestions was to rebuild the Word doc from scratch.  That wasn’t a big deal because the doc in question is a one-pager.  A bit of CTRL-C/CTRL-V got the job done in no time.  It also suggested that I move the Excel off SPO.  I saved a copy into Downloads before making a new connection from the new doc.  But here is the weirdest thing:  when the OLEDB connections eventually resolved – we are talking here no less than 5 mins – the fields in Word did not contain the values from the open Excel.  The values that displayed in the Recipient list were values from the file on SPO.  Not that Word would actually populate the preview mailings.

Does this ring any bells with anyone?  Thanks.

​Does anyone here have experience with merging Excel data into Word documents?  I had one of those days with Office, I would sooner forget.  I have an XLM file – not too heavy, but with OnCalculate VBA – which used to supply data into Word without any problems when we were still using Dropbox and pre-365 environment.  Since moving to O365 and SPO, the Word will happily take 15 minutes over opening the document.  There is some weird trick by which I can force Word to give up on DDE and switch to something called OLEDB.  It brings the time down to 1 mins – still pretty rubbish.  I talked to my new friend ChatGBT about it and I now know that I am in trouble because, after initially coming up with many helpful suggestions, it in the end referred me to Microsoft Support … 😞 One of its suggestions was to rebuild the Word doc from scratch.  That wasn’t a big deal because the doc in question is a one-pager.  A bit of CTRL-C/CTRL-V got the job done in no time.  It also suggested that I move the Excel off SPO.  I saved a copy into Downloads before making a new connection from the new doc.  But here is the weirdest thing:  when the OLEDB connections eventually resolved – we are talking here no less than 5 mins – the fields in Word did not contain the values from the open Excel.  The values that displayed in the Recipient list were values from the file on SPO.  Not that Word would actually populate the preview mailings. Does this ring any bells with anyone?  Thanks.  Read More

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