Mail Merge

[Thisguy]

For some reason when merging from Excel to Word, word
converts the text to a zero(0). There is only 4 cells
that have text in the the rest are numbers and show up in
a word document as that .... numbers. What is cousing
Word to convert the text to a 0, especially since this
dosn't seem to happen in similar situations in diffrent
colums of the same workbook.

Thanks

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Thisguy,

For some reason when merging from Excel to Word, word
converts the text to a zero(0). There is only 4 cells
that have text in the the rest are numbers and show up in
a word document as that .... numbers. What is cousing
Word to convert the text to a 0, especially since this
dosn't seem to happen in similar situations in diffrent
colums of the same workbook.

I'm guessing you're using Word 2002 or 2003? Or maybe an
ODBC connection, explicitly? Including this kind of
information in your question always helps expedite
matters...

Assuming the above is the case, then what you're seeing is
the normal behavior of Excel's ODBC driver: it looks at the
first eight data rows and sets data types for the columns
according to what it finds. And if text is in a number
column, or numbers in a text column, it tries to convert the
content (to zeros or to empty strings) to the "correct" data
type.

What you need to do is to convert these columns explicitly
to text, via the Data/Text to columns tool in Excel.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun
8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Guest]

Thanks for your repaly,

Changing excel column to text didn't work, but changing
the first record form a number to text and then opening
the merged word 2002 document did. I then saved the
document in word, changed the record to its original
numerical value.