How do you manually enter a merge field. And i am not asking about using the helper drop down.

Use Ctrl+A to select everything in the document and then press F9 to update the fields. You should then see the «fieldname»

Alternatively download the Formatted MergeFields Add-in from the following page of my OneDrive. has no limit to the number of fields that it can handle.

Miscellaneous Merge Tools

If you start by inserting a couple of merge fields through the Insert Merge Field dropdown to get something like this:

.

You can reverse that process, using Ctrl+F9 to create a field and typing the MERGEFIELD keyword followed by the name of the data column in the source. I found that I had to update the field to make it appear when pressing Alt+F9 again to collapse the codes. The manually created merge fields receive the proper data from the source.

I have to ask, though: What are you doing that requires more than 255 distinct data items, let alone 1500?

https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/aa3936f7-e90e-426b-864f-1705b808d500?platform=QnA

Word in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise will only display the first 256 fields in the dropdown.

There is however no limit with my Add-in which can display all of the 16,384 fields that can be accommodated in Excel.

Yeah for me i will test your add-in but you know im not really gonna be able to suggest this to clients. Although the client did find that word 365 will display upto 1000 fields in the drop down.

I work for a piece of software used in court systems and one of our tools has about 1500 tokens. We use the mail merge with a custom list of tokens the program replaces the mail merge tokens with data. I am rather new and don't think our devs know of the 255 field limitation. Our other tool only has like 100 fields but this one program has 1500 and of course customers will want to add ones they cant see so I need to determine how to add them manually as well as test that anything beyond 255 is actually able to be used and was loaded which i think it is from my research just the helper is severly limited.

And hmm yeah i can see how that should work. I noted also if you hit ctrl+f9 on the page it makes {} ie so you can type yours in, but if I fill it in and then unf9 it goes blank doesn't leave me with <<whatever>> as i expect i can toggle the field again to see what i had previously typed which i think this is the manual method but theres something missing or not really working.

So here's the manual method ive noted that isnt workign quite right.

place cursor on page press ctrl+f9 you will get a highlighted {}

type in I gather mergefield "whatver" then click away from where you type then right click toggle field codes and what you typed vanishes i expect it to be replaced with "whatever" but it's not it's just there blank

Tested it with blank and it does work so thats how to as it manually above just it wont display the<<whatever>> as one expects to see