Office 2003 Mail merge not preserving currency format

[Umtalipete]

Just upgraded to Office 2003 and have a number of letters that merge data
extracted from an Access database, which includes fields with currency and
dates. In Office 2000 these functions all worked but in Office 2003 the dates
seem ok but the currency just comes over as a plain number eg entry in
database 175 displayed in database as £175.00 but in the word doc is just
plain 175 where as in 2000 it appeared as £175.00. The fields in the database
are set as currency. Any ideas on how to overcome this and why it happens?
Many Thanks

 

[Peter Jamieson]

It occurs because
a. data and formatting are separated in Access
b. the default method Word uses to connect to Access data has changed from
"DDE" in Word 2000 to "OLEDB" in Word 2002/3/7
c. DDE gets the data from Access itself (which must be on your machine) and
delivers it more or less as you see it in many cases
d. OLEDB uses the underlying Jet database engine to get the data and
ignores the formatting.

You can either use "formatting switches" in your Word fields, e.g. use
Alt-F9 to show

{ MERGEFIELD myamount }

and change it to

{ MERGEFIELD myamount \#"£,0.00" }

That should be enough in simple situations.

Or you can check Word Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversions at open",
go through the process of connecting to your data source again, and select
the DDE option when offered.

There are many differences between the two, but some you may need to take
note of at some point are:
a. DDE doesn't pass non-ANSI Unicode characters through
b. OLEDB can't "see" certain types of query, e.g. parameter queries, and it
doesn't understand the old "*" and "?" wildcards in queries that use LIKE

Peter Jamieson

 

[Graham Mayor]

See also http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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