Dropping trailing zeros in word 2000 mail merge

[Carla Bradley]

I have a client doing a mail merge in Word 2000 using an
Excel 2000 spreadsheet as her source. This is a mail
merge letter and two of the fields she is pulling are a
dollar amount and a date field. She had the dollar amount
formatted as a number with 2 digits after the decimal.
She has the date field formatted as date using the month
spelled out as in November 18, 2003.

When she does the merge, the trailing zeros on the dollar
amount are cut off and it converts the date to 11/18/03.
I tried changing the formatting in the excel doc to
currency for the dollar amount but the same thing
happened. I can only find reference on Microsoft's site
to this happening with Access as the data source so the
help won't help me here.

Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
Carla
carla.bradley@[delete this]lgeenergy.com

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Try applying formatting switches to the fields /in Word/, e.g. show the
field codes using Alt-F9 and change

{ MERGEFIELD mydollaramount } to

{ MERGEFIELD mydollaramount \#"$,0.00" }

and

{ MERGEFIELD mydate }

to

{ MERGEFIELD mydate \@"MMMM D, YYYY" }

or

{ MERGEFIELD mydate \@"MMMM DD, YYYY" }

Those should be OK if you are using the formats generally used in the USA -
otherwise, you really need to check that the month and day are not
"reversed" in the date.