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I am using mail merge in MS Word for generating some documents and all the data comes from a specific Excel worksheet.

However it looks like that there is some kind of limitation for the columns you can use in your Excel worksheet for such mergefields and it turns out to be 255. When some kind of information is put in cells with columns greater than 255 these fields are not found by Word even though they have titles above them.

All my excel and word files are .xlsm and .docm and I am using MS 365 so I do not think it has anything to do with versions since they are the latest.

Do you have any idea what could be causing this limitation and is there a way of overpassing it?

Thank you in advance!

braX
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GSabev
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  • In earlier Excel versions and in the .xls file format the column limit was 255 indeed. I would guess that this limitation is still in place here. But that's just a guess. I also found this: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/3af8ebdf-27a5-4d70-ac62-0b5885637a4e/mail-merge-field-limits – Wolfgang Jacques Aug 19 '20 at 13:50

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No, you cannot remove the limitation according to this. It says

It depends on the data source.

  • For a data source that is a table in Word, it is 62.
  • For an Access Table\Query or Excel data source it is 255 or 256
  • A properly structured .csv file can have more.
Wolfgang Jacques
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  • [florin](https://stackoverflow.com/users/12248225) posted an [Answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/66091338) saying "thanks for answer. it works. a properly structured .csv is, for example, an exported excel file to .csv but the .csv MUST have values in all cells from last column. just add a DUMMY column and fill all cells with some data." – Scratte Feb 08 '21 at 07:06