Brainlitter » Word could not re-establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Excel to complete the current task

Word could not re-establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Excel to complete the current task

I never thought I’d be blogging about Office 2000 (frankly, I don’t recall if I would have known what a blog was, back then…). Anyways, this was a strange enough one to resolve today that perhaps it will help someone else (and/or maybe it applied to later versions of Word, Excel and Office).

 

Our client has Office 2000 and had a Merge defined between Word 2000 and Excel 2000. It *used* to work and then *all of a sudden*, whenever they opened their Word template, they would get the following… Word could not re-establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Excel to complete the current task

 

 

The Fix

 

The problem is (and not obvious, by the error, as shown below) that the Mail Merge feature will not work on the XLS sheet, if there is a filter defined. Any filtering needed, on the Mail Merge, needs to be done within Word and the Mail Merge function, not in advance, in Excel. A user had opened the XLS file, set a filter and then saved it with that setting. So, I simply changed the source XLS file to turn the filter off and saved it.

 

 

Thus, you need to ensure the ‘source’ Excel Worksheet has no filters on columns… I have saved the XLS sheet without the filter applied and it is working again.

4 responses to “Word could not re-establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Excel to complete the current task”

  1. This does not seem to work for me. There are no filters on the spreadsheet.

    This worked yesterday and last night I added some more rows to the spreadsheet (inserted and then resorted). Not I get the unable to connect error message.

    Yet I can connect to other excel spreadsheets (same layout) with the same word document with no problem.

    Somehow Excel must be making some change to the spreadsheet on save that I can not see.

    Any ideas????

  2. Well, I have made progress. I copied the rows of the spreadsheet that would not make connection and pasted them into a new spreadsheet. Saved it and then opened my word document for the mail merge. Selected the new spreadsheet and all worked find!!

    This is very weird.

    David

  3. I experienced the same problem. I read several tips that I tried to no avail. Of course the “confirm File Format” needs to be selected in Word (File, Options, Advanced, General, Confirm File Format). No filters set on the spreadsheet. And using the OLE DB Database will not carry over the Excel formatting (a terrible workaround to this is formatting your data in Excel to “Text” which may mean you need to manually re-enter your data – ugh).

    BUT – I found that my Excel files TYPES were being saved as “Excel Workbook” and my Word file TYPES were being saved as “Word Document.” When I changed the file types to: “Excel 97-2003 Workbook” and “Word 97-2003 Document” I found the merge worked! It brought over the data in the proper format from Excel to Word! 🙂

    I was elated to learn this after losing hours in research for this problem, then hours reformatting for the terrible workaround to use the OLE DB Database. Those of us who are avid Word/Excel mergers need the DDE to work – and this works. Cheers!

    1. Glad to hear this helped someone, still. I wrote that in 2009 (July 25th). Amazing it still brought some value. 🙂

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