We have been using our Wordmerge program for over a year without issue.  Starting a few days ago, whenever we do a merge, when Microsoft Word opens, a file conversion box opens up showing the Source data(our customer.txt file that is exported from Sesame) and requires us to click on OK to continue.  The merge then goes on as normal.

We have not installed any new software on either the server or workstations, there may have been some automatic updates to Word but I am not sure.   Any ideas why this would have changed?   Any suggestions for how to eliminate this?

Thanks in advance.

Word 2007

The title is "File Conversion - Customer.txt"
It asks to "Select the encoding that makes your document readable."

In researching this on the web, it appears that when you open a text file, "Word attempts to detect the encoding standard used for text in the file. Word can automatically detect most encoding standards. When the file's encoding standard matches the default encoding standard used to save files as plain text in the version of Microsoft Windows you are running, Word opens the file directly.

If Word cannot detect the encoding standard, or if it detects an encoding standard that doesn't match the default standard used by Windows, you must verify or choose the encoding standard from a list in the File Conversion dialog box. Word then uses the encoding standard you choose to convert the file to Unicode (Unicode: A character encoding standard developed by the Unicode Consortium. By using more than one byte to represent each character, Unicode enables almost all of the written languages in the world to be represented by using a single character set.). You can preview the text to check whether it is readable before you open the file."

I have not made any changes to my database programming.  I have checked the settings in Word that apply to encoding.   I do not know where else to look as to the reason why the encoding would have changed or why Word changed the way it handles the text files created.

Any Ideas are appreciated.

No.  And the file opens just perfect.  If I open it in any text editor it looks perfect.

Hammer wrote on Oct 3^rd, 2008 at 9:13pm:

This sounds like the most likely cause. I just ran into a situation earlier today, where a client wanted me to export some data and merge it into address labels in Word for them.

I kept getting errors about the data after reading the source file into Word. It turned out that there was a backslash at the end of a city name. This escaped the double quote which appeared after the field value, and threw off the rest of the data. I discovered where the problem was located, by importing small sections at a time to narrow it down. As Erika points out, start by just importing the first few lines of the data, to see if you still get the message.

Are there any hyphens in the data or the header?

On the menus, choose Tools/Options.
Look on the General Tab.

Is the box marked Confirm Conversion at Open checked?

If so, does unchecking it fix the problem?

Hmm. Did this suddenly start happening on all your workstations, or only on some of them?

This is sounding like an Automatic Update issue related to a driver or Word's text converter add-in. I'm not finding specific enough information though. I keep seeing mentions of how Word may not recognize encoding in text files. One MS support article talked about opening the txt file in Word, saving as a doc (Word format), then using the doc as the data source for your merge. Does that work?