ID: Q179971
The information in this article applies to:
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."
Microsoft Direct Mail Manager can only read data in Microsoft Word documents when the data is stored in a table format.
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.
You can now use this document as your address in Microsoft Direct Mail Manager.
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.
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
Keywords : kbdmm
Version : WINDOWS:
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbbug kbprb
Solution Type : kbpendingLast Reviewed: February 12, 1999