When trying to mail merge a CSV file into Word (that had been exported from Civicrm) I kept running into the error code ‘Record 1 contained too many data fields‘. All I was doing was importing the file and mapping the fields, then once I clicked ‘update labels’ it would tell me I had an error on record 1, when i clicked ok then it started going through every record (which was over 400) – so I had to close word using the task manager.
To get round this problem I opened the CSV file in Excel then saved it as an .xls file then went through the mail merge process without any problems, (except with my printer – but that is a different story that I would have ideally ended with me, a baseball bat and a Sharp printer in a million pieces).
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253818