Thank you both for your quick help. I've tried to paste the example into the
Advanced Field Properties Field Codes field and even when I can get the
whole string in, I don't get an active OK button. Is there a trick to this
or another place I should go to edit the statement?
Thanks again,
--
Julie

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

An extra quote mark sneaked in to Macropod's reply - try

{IF{MERGEFIELD Rubella_Due-Date \@ yyyyMMdd}= 0 "" "We show that your auto
insurance expires on {MERGEFIELD Rubella_Due-Date \@ dd/MM/yyyy}. Please
submit proof of insurance including your name and new expiration date."}

With some versions of Word setting a nul result as the first option can
cause the wrong data to be entered. I therefore prefer to avoid this by
reversing the conditions thus:

{IF{MERGEFIELD Rubella_Due-Date \@ yyyyMMdd} 0 "We show that your auto
insurance expires on {MERGEFIELD Rubella_Due-Date \@ dd/MM/yyyy}. Please
submit proof of insurance including your name and new expiration date."}

The result should be the same.

There is some information on field formatting on my web site at
http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


macropod wrote:
Hi Julie,

Try:

{IF{MERGEFIELD Rubella_Due-Date \@ yyyyMMdd}= 0 "" ""We show that
your auto insurance expires on {MERGEFIELD Rubella_Due-Date \@
dd/MM/yyyy}. Please submit proof of insurance including your name
and new expiration date."}

Cheers


"julie" wrote in message
...
Using Word 2003, I'd like to suppress a merge field if certain
conditions exist, along with the preceeding and following text.
I've been using the MergeField options (obtained when I right click
on a merge field and choose Edit Field): Text to be included before
& Text to be included after to combine my merge field with text.

If I look at the Field Codes after setting up my text, I see...

MERGEFIELD Rubella_Due_DAte \b "We show that your auto insurance
expires on " \f ". Please submit proof of insurance including your
name and new expiration date."

Is there a way I can add an If, then, else to this so that If
MERGEFIELD Rubella_Due-DAte = 00/00/00 the merge field and it's
preceding and following text is suppressed? Can I simply edit the
Field Codes text to include this?

I apologize if this is a dumb question. I'm new to conditional
formatting in Word. I'd also appreciate any pointers to good
documents or books on this topic.

Thanks,
--
Julie