I have an excel spread that I pass between work and home. I use it for a
datasource in mailmerge. At home I have MSOFFICE2003 PRO. At work I have
MSOFFICE2000 PRO. I took the spread and the Word mail merge document home on
my stick last night and made changes to both. I had no problems. This morning
at work, when I try to open the Excel spread from word mailmerge WORD 2000
PRO says "Word could not re-establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Excel to
complete the current task."

I have tried saving the excel spread and the word mail merge files in a
different folder and then reattempting to open the word mailmerge file --
with no luck.