Workaround for merging long data fields without truncation

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Gina Gerhard
Gina Gerhard ✭
Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
Not sure if this is common knowledge, but we found a very simple workaround that enables a long text field to be merged without truncating the data. - This workaround is geared around data that has been exported to Excel, and then using the Excel file as your data source for the merge. Apparently (according to Microsoft) if you put the data with the LONGEST text value as the top data row in your spreadsheet, then Word will use that length as the 'permitted' length for merging the other data. - For example: We often merge in our fund purpose language which is kept in a notepad. When we export this data, some of the text is very long and we've always had issues with the longer data being truncated in our merge. Now if we find the longest text, move it to the top of the spreadsheet and then perform the merge, we no longer have data truncating. If you do not want to reorder your data to put the longest data at the top, you can create a dummy record and enter the longest amount of dummy text in the field - so it will then allow all subsequent data to be merged without running into a length restriction.
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  • Nicole S
    Nicole S ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Gina Gerhard:
    Not sure if this is common knowledge, but we found a very simple workaround that enables a long text field to be merged without truncating the data. - This workaround is geared around data that has been exported to Excel, and then using the Excel file as your data source for the merge. Apparently (according to Microsoft) if you put the data with the LONGEST text value as the top data row in your spreadsheet, then Word will use that length as the 'permitted' length for merging the other data. - For example: We often merge in our fund purpose language which is kept in a notepad. When we export this data, some of the text is very long and we've always had issues with the longer data being truncated in our merge. Now if we find the longest text, move it to the top of the spreadsheet and then perform the merge, we no longer have data truncating. If you do not want to reorder your data to put the longest data at the top, you can create a dummy record and enter the longest amount of dummy text in the field - so it will then allow all subsequent data to be merged without running into a length restriction.

     Good to know!

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