I'm not sure this is going to answer your question, but here goes anyway...
one would think it would override a style code of a paragraph
I would also tend to hope that, but there are some things to watch out for
in all this, e.g.
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1. with styles in general and formatting fields in particular, Word tends
to see formatting in terms of the differences between
- the styles that pertain to the text in question and
- the direct formatting you apply
So, to give a contrived example, suppose you have a subdocument with a
single paragraph containing some text and a MERGEFIELD field with no
switches. The paragraph style says "underlined", but actually you format
everything in the paragraph /except/ the field as not underlined. (OK, I
said it was contrived). Then in your mail merge main document, you
INCLUDETEXT the file in a normal paragraph with no underlining.
In this case you should not see any underlining in the output. Word applies
the style and formatting of the main document, which is not underlined. The
text in the subdocument is not underlined anyway, but in the case of the
underlined field, well, its formatting is no different from the paragraph
style. But Word isn't looking at the paragraph style, just differences
between the paragraph style and direct formatting, and there are none in
this case. So the result is not underlined. If however, you colour the
MERGEFIELD red, red will appear in the result. What's more, there is no
difference if you use \*Charformat, which is distressing,.
Actually, I don't think my description is completely accurate but the person
to ask IMO is John McGhie who probably understands these style mixing issues
better than anyone (You're more likely to find him in the Mac Word group).
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2. In your main document, in a Normal paragraph, insert your INCLUDETEXT
field with no switches. Then change the formatting of the field or
paragraph, e.g. the font. Do you see a \*Mergeformat being added? Maybe not,
but here I do, at the moment. I can kill the \*Mergeformat but I'm not sure
how long it stays dead.
The trouble with \*Mergeformat is that
- its name isn't exactly self-explanatory, and in fact I think it's quite
misleading. I suspect a lot of people think it's kind of the opposite of
\*charformat, and applies the format of the surrounding text.
- at some point, someone in Microsoft started adding \*Mergeformat by
default to pretty well every field that anyone inserted through the user
interface. I suspect they didn't understand what it does, either. Word Help
nearly gets it right
"Applies the formatting of the previous result to the new result. For
example, if you select the name displayed by the field { AUTHOR \*
MERGEFORMAT } and apply bold formatting, Microsoft Word retains the bold
formatting when the field is updated when the author name changes. "
If that's all it does, why would you need it? Why not just apply the
formatting to the field and have the result be the same as the field? Well,
one reason is that the current Help only tells part of the story. The
original Word for Windows Help (and I'm going back to my WfW1 manual) says
that \*Mergeformat
"Applies the formatting of the previous result, word for word, to the new
result."
"If there is no previous result, applies the formatting of the first
character after the opening field character ({) to the result."
(I think it means the first non-blank character - in those days Word did not
insert extra space before field names).
There's more, to do with what happens if the number of words changes, but I
think it may be wrong or changed.
So \*Mergeformat is tricky, and things are likely to be even trickier when
it's applied to an INCLUDETEXT which is including a variable amount of text.
So Word adding a sneaky \*Mergeformat isn't a great help.
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3. (Probably not relevant to your problem, but perhaps worth mentioning
anyway). If you merge to a new document, INCLUDETEXT fields are retained in
the output. Word evaluates the included text in each case and inserts the
results, otherwise it wouldn't work at all. But if you actually select all
those INCLUDETEXTs and press F9, the original file is inserted with all its
{ MERGEFIELD } codes etc. So beware! - if you need to keep the results,
"fix" them by selecting everything and using ctrl-shift-F9.
Sorry, it's late here and I'm rambling...
Peter Jamieson
