Merging data from Database to a word document

[ivan]

I have a database using Access 97 that has date from 1800 till today and
they are formatted in DD-MMM-YYYY so that a date say 13-5-1881 will be shown
as 13-May-1881. This format is shown correctly in Access for any date. I have
now designed a document using word 97 so that I can merge my data from the
database to word. Unfortunately the date is showing incorrectly when there is
a date before 31-12-1900 as it is shown in American format: that is if the
date is 13-5-1881 it is shown as 5/13/1881 instead of 13-May-1881 the way I
would like to have it. My code for the merge data date is MERGFIELD "Date" \@
"DD-MMM-YYYY" which works well when date are after the year 1900 but not
before. I wonder if someone could help me fix this problem as I can't find
the answer on the Internet.

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Ivan,

You may want to also check with the folks in the MS Word Mailmerge discussion group through the link below or in the MS Access group
but through at least Word 2000 dates prior to 01/01/1901 weren't recognized by Word as dates when sorting data so I'm assuming the
date field may have a similar limitation, but I don't have the machine with that version running at present to test. Excel has a
similar date formatting starting point of 01/01/1900

A workaround was to bring the dates in as plain text and format or to have separate fields for day, month, year and format those to
appear together, or or if I recall correctly to use an Access query to format, otherwise use a macro in Word on the fieldcodes to
change them to 'text'.

In Word 2000 they increased the upper year range from 2035 to 4095 but didn't do anything with the lower year range.

Excel has a similar limitation that you can workaround with an Add-in
http://j-walk.com/ss/excel/files/xdate.htm but I don't recall seeing a similar one for Word, although the folks in Mailmerge
discussion group probably have a solution for you

==============
I have a database using Access 97 that has date from 1800 till today and
they are formatted in DD-MMM-YYYY so that a date say 13-5-1881 will be shown
as 13-May-1881. This format is shown correctly in Access for any date. I have
now designed a document using word 97 so that I can merge my data from the
database to word. Unfortunately the date is showing incorrectly when there is
a date before 31-12-1900 as it is shown in American format: that is if the
date is 13-5-1881 it is shown as 5/13/1881 instead of 13-May-1881 the way I
would like to have it. My code for the merge data date is MERGFIELD "Date" \@
"DD-MMM-YYYY" which works well when date are after the year 1900 but not
before. I wonder if someone could help me fix this problem as I can't find
the answer on the Internet. >>
--
Please let us know if this has helped,

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

LINKS
A. Specific newsgroup/discussion group mentioned in this message:
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
or via browser:
http://microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/?dg=microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields

B. MS Office Community discussion/newsgroups via Web Browser
http://microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx
or
Microsoft hosted newsgroups via Outlook Express/newsreader
news://msnews.microsoft.com