DMM: Unable to Read Tab or Comma Delimited Word Documents

• Microsoft Direct Mail Manager for Windows

SYMPTOMS

If you attempt to use a Microsoft Word document containing tab or comma delimited data as your address list in Microsoft Direct Mail Manager, you will receive the following error message:

   Error: "The selected document <document name> does not contain a table."

CAUSE

Microsoft Direct Mail Manager can only read data in Microsoft Word documents when the data is stored in a table format.

WORKAROUND

To convert your data from tab or comma delimited format to table format, follow these steps:

1. Select the data. (On the Edit menu, click Select All.)

2. On the Table menu, click Convert Text To Table.

3. Click somewhere in the document so that the text from the table is no longer selected.

4. Save and Close the document.

NOTE: This workaround has several limitations:

   - Microsoft Word is limited to 63 columns of data in a table. Therefore,
     Word cannot convert more then 63 fields of data into a table.

   - In order for this workaround to correctly separate the fields into
     table cells, there must be the same number of fields in each data
     record. Having an inconsistent number of fields in the records will
     create blank cells or the data may end up in the wrong fields. You can
     correct the records by adding extra commas or tabs for the blank data
     so that all of the records have the same number of fields.

REFERENCES

For more information about converting data to table format, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q140344
   TITLE     : WD: How to Convert Data in One Column to a Table for Merging

   ARTICLE-ID: Q142101
   TITLE     : WD: Text Converted to One Row (Paragraph Marks Ignored)

   ARTICLE-ID: Q159687
   TITLE     : WD: How to Convert WordPerfect 6.x Data Files and Address
               Books