Mail Merge fields formatted incorrectly

[Judy Freed]

Products Used: Word XP, Excel XP with SP-2

Problem: User creates a mail merge form in Word to merge with an Excel
worksheet. The Worksheet is actually the result of an Access query. All
files reside on a shared drive. When the user performs the mail merge, she
ends up with

Amount: 60
Date: 12/17/02

When I perform the mail merge, I end up with:

Amount: $60.00
Date: December 17, 2002

We are both performing the mail merge using Mail Merge Helper, not the
Wizard. The worksheet itself is formatted correctly. In fact, we attempted
the mail merge on two other machines and they had the same results as her.
We also attempted the merge using the Wizard, with the same results.

I am at a loss to explain why this is working correctly on my computer and
not hers or any of the others. However, one of the users is telling me I
corrected this on her computer some time ago, but I have no idea how I did
it, if I did it.

Any of you Word gurus know what we need to do? Any assistance is
appreciated.

Thanks

Judy Freed
Systems Development
UNC Charlotte.

 

[Debbie]

Judy:

That is kind of odd. However, you can check the
formatting on her machine. It's not the formatting in
Excel that you need to check, it's the Word formatting.
While looking at the Merge field in Word, hit Alt + F9.
You will see something that looks like:

{MERGEFIELD yourfieldname}

You will need to add some characters to this field and you
need them to be all in the darkened area (if you don't see
a darkened area, don't worry, just make sure you don't
delete anything):

{MERGEFIELD yourfieldname \@ "MMMM d, yyyy"}

Afterward, hit Alt + F9 again and save.

Good luck.

debbie =}

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Judy,

The Wizard will certainly use OLE DB. The old Mail Merge Helper should be
using DDE by default - and the result you see sounds like that. But the other
installations may be using a different default.

If you activate "Confirm conversions on open" in Tools/Options/General on a
few machines, after you select the data source you should get a list of
connection methods. Compare these with what you see on your machine?

Problem: User creates a mail merge form in Word to merge with an Excel
worksheet. The Worksheet is actually the result of an Access query. All
files reside on a shared drive. When the user performs the mail merge, she
ends up with

Amount: 60
Date: 12/17/02

When I perform the mail merge, I end up with:

Amount: $60.00
Date: December 17, 2002

We are both performing the mail merge using Mail Merge Helper, not the
Wizard. The worksheet itself is formatted correctly. In fact, we attempted
the mail merge on two other machines and they had the same results as her.
We also attempted the merge using the Wizard, with the same results.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep 30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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