Mergefield edits

[Jewels]

Hi!
I have a hard coded dated that will always come through on any mergefields
that should have had a date entered into our database. If someone
inadvertantly leaves it blank, it will return a date like this Jan 1 1753. I
dont want that showing on correspondence. Instead I would want it to be
blank. It is easy to find documentation about skipping spaces and blank
lines, but seems to difficult to find information about these types of
scenarios.

Here is what my mergefield says
«MERGEFIELD Sbsb_Hire_Dt»

Any help is appreciated!
Thanks

 

[Peter Jamieson]

There are at least a couple of things you can do.

1. Assuming that Jan 1 1753 is what you get with a { MERGEFIELD myfield }
field with no date formating switches, and you never need dates back in the
18th centuryyou can use a nested IF field such as

{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD myfield }" = "Jan 1 1753" "" "{ MERGEFIELD myfield }" }

(All the {} have to be the special field code braces you can insert using
ctrl-F9).

2. You can try to find out why Word is receiving that particular value from
your database when the date is null or blank, and see if there is a way to
change what the database provides.

e.g. in some cases Word might receive a value such as Jan 1 1900 or some
such from Excel, because its date system starts at 1900 (or whatever it is).
There's not a lot you can do about that except to change the way Word gets
its data from Excel.

I don't think I've come across a 1753 start date before so wonder what
database you are using.