International Zip Codes & Mail Merge

[Roy]

I am attempting to do a mail merge from an excel document that contains
names and addresses of my advertisers. When I attempt to do a mail merge,
for some reason word turns the international zip codes from the file into
"0" . . . I reformat the zip code cells in excel as text, hoping that it
would just read the string. Unfortunatley the zip codes are still coming up
as "0".

Is there a way to do remedy this? I've searched google and microsoft.com
with no luck.

Thanks,
Roy

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Alphanumeric postal codes such as the Canadian and UK ones will probably
show up as 0 if Word thinks the column they are in holds numeric data.

Your best bet in this case is probably to change the way Word connects to
Excel back to the old method (DDE) - check Word
Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversions at open", reconnect to Excel and
select the DDE option when offered.

Longer term you can probably get Word to recognise the column as "text" by
ensuring that the first 25 or so rows have alphanumeric values in them.

Alternatively you might be in a position to put your address data into an
Access database and use a text column for the postcode - as far as I know,
in that situation the Jet OLEDB provider+Word respects the data type you
have defined for the column, whereas for Excel sheets, setting the cell
format to Text for the column isn't necessarily enough to do that.

Peter Jamieson