I hate being forced to "top post".
Anyway, thanks for this very helpful answer. The referenced article has some
*very* good stuff, and I'm grateful to find out the reason for the change in
behavior. The developers may not consider this "broken", but I had never seen
any mention of the change and was taken by surprise. I spent a couple of days
floundering until I remembered the possibility of using a display switch.
Incidentally, the numeric switch I mentioned, "\# ####;'';''", displays
alphabetic characters as well as numbers, if the data field is not blank, and
suppresses the 0.
"Graham Mayor" wrote:
The behaviour has not 'broken' it was deliberately changed to overcome
problems related to the rather flaky DDE data connection method that was
used in the earlier versions. Current merges (from Word 2002 on) collect
only the raw data from the data source and formatting with switches is the
best and most reliable way of dealing with formatting issues that arise.
http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm
The DDE method of data connection is however still available in the
application. From the Tools menu in Word, select Options and then go to the
General tab and check the box against the "Confirm conversions at open"
item. (In Word 2007 it is Office Button Word Options Advanced General
Confirm file format conversion on open). Then when you attach the data
source to the mail merge main document, you will be given the option of
using the DDE method of connection which should read the data as you have it
formatted in the table.
--
Graham Mayor - Word MVP
My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org