Zip+4 formatting in mail merge

[HoyaJane]

My data source is in an Excel spreadsheet. Some zip codes are 5 digits, some
are 5+4. When I open the data source in Word, leading zeros are dropped from
all of the 5 digit zips. More troublesome is the problem that all of the 5+4
zip codes appear as 0. I've tried formatting the field as text to no avail on
either problem.

 

[Anne Troy]

The lovely Graham explains this about 2/3rds of the way down this page:
http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm
*******************
~Anne Troy

www.OfficeArticles.com

 

[HoyaJane]

The leading zero problem is resolved, thank you.

The bigger issue, and the one that remains is the problem of the Zip+4
formatting changing the data to 0. That is to say, in Excel, the data is, for
example, 97105-4568, in Word, in the "review/edit data" screen, the zip field
is populated with 0 for every record that has a zip+4 format. Simply
formatting this with a switch won't work because then it's populated with
00000-0000.

 

[Graham Mayor]

The problem is the hyphen in the Excel data source. Remove that and you can
use the method suggested on the page Ann posted earlier. If you are unable
to remove the hyphen from the data source, then see the Excel data section
of http://www.gmayor.com/mail_merge_labels_with_word_xp.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[HoyaJane]

Eventually, it worked, though the process was very arduous. In the end, using
the command buttons (instead of the wizard) with a .txt version of the data
file worked.

If you are referring to the DDE method of data transfer in your response, I
tried that and the whole system crashed.

I think, in general, these are persistent problems the good people at
Microsoft would do well to fix.