Between Word 2000 and Word 2002 (Office XP), Microsoft changed the way Word
links to external data sources. By default, Word 2002 and 2003 use OLEDB,
which does not preserve numeric formatting in Excel worksheets. There are
two ways around this:
1. You can choose to connect to Excel using DDE as before. To do this, you
must check the box for "Confirm conversion at Open" on the General tab of
Tools | Options in Word. Then, when you select the data source, you will be
given a choice of connection method, and you can choose DDE. Although this
preserves number formatting, it does not, I believe preserve double-byte
Unicode characters, so it can be a bit of a trade-off.
2. You can use a "numeric picture switch" (\# switch) to format the merge
field. For more on this, see Word's Help topic "Numeric Picture (\#) field
switch" and this article:
http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm
