Mail Merge Time (suddenly) displaying as decimals again

Hi Paul.
I followed the Microsoft Knowledgebase document at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320473 create the DDE link between my Excel datasource and my word main mail merge document.

When I run the report manually, it appears that the time proble has been resolved. The report merges flawlessly.

However, with this change, I have lost the functionality of the automation code I have in my Excel application which allows a user to click a button to initiate the merge. What is supposed to happen is, from a userform in Excel, the user clicks a button to initiate the merging of data into the document. The Excel macro opens word, selects the report, and launches to document to merge. Before this DDE thing, it worked, the only problem being the missed time formats.

What is happening now is ... the user clicks the button, and the application stalls. It takes a CTRL-ALT-DEL to recover. With this action, one can see that Word has executed in the background, but nothing appears to be happening. The user would end (Word) task, which results in Excel's "File in use" prompt. 'MergeData.xls' is in use and loced for editting."

Pressing "Read only" releases whatever action is screwing the merging up and the Word document appears successfully merged. The user is (inappropriately) prompted to save the changes to "MergeData.xlsx" ... the datasource ... which shouldn't be.

I think I'm back to this issue again ...

http://www.excelforum.com/excel-prog...html?p=2829216