Excel XP to Word XP mail merge: date formats (again!)

[Alasdair]

Hello.

I've had a look at Cindy Meister's and Graham Mayor's pages, but don't see
this particular issue discussed....


I have an Excel spreadsheet with all dates in the format dd/mm/yy. When I
merge into a word document all the dates are displayed as dd/mm/yy. So far,
so good!

HOWEVER, in the 'Mail Merge Recipients' window as I'm filtering the data,
the date fields appear as mm/dd/yy. Also, any blank fields appear as
'12:00:00 AM'. Is there anyway of making this appear as dd/mm/yy?

It's not a showstopper, but it would help my staff who are doing the
mailmerge if it was consistently dd/mm/yy.

Thanks

Alasdair

 

[Graham Mayor]

See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=327579

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP
E-mail (e-mail address removed)
Web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site www.mvps.org/word
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[Peter Jamieson]

I'd be interested to know whether or not you asked for the hotfix described
in

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=327579

and if so, whether it makes any difference to the display in the Recipients
dialog.

Otherwise, I think the only options are
a. use the Converter to connect (you should see the dates exactly as you
want in the Recients dialog)
b. use ODBC to connect (you should see the correct date format but with a
following 00:00:00 time, and blank dates should be blank)
c. Use MS Query to connect and write queries that convert dates to texts.
(I haven't tried it as IMO it's overkill in this situation even if it
works).

Trouble is that whenever you change the connection method it tends to
introduce other formatting or operational issues.