Hangs at Initiating DDE Link with Microsoft Excel

Doing Mail Merge with Excel Spreadsheet, just hangs with
Initiating DDE Link with Microsoft Excel.

Have re-installed Office 2000; loaded every update;
disabled Norton Plug In; Disabled all loaded programs;
searched the knowledge base and haven't a clue what to do
next.

Doesn't matter what spreadsheet and the spreadsheets open
fine independent of Mail Merge in Word.

One other interesting thing that may or may not be
related. When I bring up a Windows Explorer window, it
takes over 1 minute to accomplish that task. All other
programs have no "slow" problem (yet....)

Any help/ideas/suggestions would be appreciated

Sorry - forgot vers
Windows ME
Office 2000

Hi Wanda,

Slow DDE seems to be more a Windows configuration problem
than anything else. I had a machine where this was a
problem, and never was able to find out how to fix it... (I
never did try a re-format of the hard-drive, that might well
have fixed it)

I advise you to pursue the Windows Explorer problem, first,
in a Windows newsgroup. Perhaps if you can get to the bottom
of what's causing that, it will make a difference for mail
merge.

FWIW, if you search the error message (exact wording!) in
the microsoft.com Knowledge Base you will turn up a number
of hits. Basically, they'll mostly tell you to try a
different connection method.

If you want to do that, activate the Select Method checkbox
in the Open Data Source dialog box, then choose ODBC or
Word's internal spreadsheet converter. That should at least
get you up and running...

Doing Mail Merge with Excel Spreadsheet, just hangs with
Initiating DDE Link with Microsoft Excel.

Have re-installed Office 2000; loaded every update;
disabled Norton Plug In; Disabled all loaded programs;
searched the knowledge base and haven't a clue what to do
next.

Doesn't matter what spreadsheet and the spreadsheets open
fine independent of Mail Merge in Word.

One other interesting thing that may or may not be
related. When I bring up a Windows Explorer window, it
takes over 1 minute to accomplish that task. All other
programs have no "slow" problem (yet....)


Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep
30 2003)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any
follow question or reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail
:-)

Hi,

I also was having Word Hang when launching Excel:

'Waiting for Microsoft Excel to accept DDE Commands"
and
"initiating DDE Link with Microsoft Excel"

MY 100% FIX WAS:

Selected the highest level Folder in Explorer (that contained any related files like the XLS) and right clicked to UNCHECK the READ ONLY attribute to affect all files below the selected folder...

I think at least one required file in Word or Excel went read-only and that created the problem.. THIS WAS A 100% fix for us!

Originally Posted by Wanda

Doing Mail Merge with Excel Spreadsheet, just hangs with
Initiating DDE Link with Microsoft Excel....