Blank Access date field returns 12:00:00 AM in mail merge form

[Eric W. Crawford]

I have an Access database with several fields formatted for
dates. Many are blank. When doing mail merge (using Word
2000), the "recipients list" shows 12:00:00 AM for these
blank fields, and that is what gets put into the merge
form. Is there any way to prevent this or work around it?
I've been unable to solve the problem by formatting the
merge fields in the Word form. Blank text fields in Access
show up as blanks in the merge form. Thanks for any suggestions

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Probably the simplest way to fix this (as long as the merge is only being
used on systems which use the same standard time format) is to use an IF
field such as

{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD mydate }" = "12:00:00 AM" "" "{ MERGEFIELD mydate }" }

with an \@ format switch in the latter MERGEFIELD field as necessary.

 

[Eric W. Crawford]

-----Original Message-----
Probably the simplest way to fix this (as long as the merge is only being
used on systems which use the same standard time format) is to use an IF
field such as

{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD mydate }" = "12:00:00 AM" "" "{ MERGEFIELD mydate }" }

with an \@ format switch in the latter MERGEFIELD field as necessary.

Peter,

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried this, and other
variations, and it didn't work. Sometimes it gave me
"12:00:00", and sometimes it gave me "{ MERGEFIELD mydate
}" I'm mystified by why I couldn't make any IF statement
solution work, since it seems straightforward.

However, from one of your replies to another recent post I
picked up a solution to the basic problem, which involves
changing the method used to connect to the data source:
clicking on Word Tools|Options|General| then checking
"Confirm conversion at open," then going through the data
source selection process again and choosing MS Access
Databases via DDE, etc. That gives me a recipients file
with blanks in it for the empty date fields.

So thanks for an even better solution!

--Eric