[********Meg]

thanks, I think I understand what you are saying, but I'm not clear in how
to do the formatting. This is VERY new for me.

here is what I have
{mergefeild Required Reading\b "required reading:'}

I want the text Required Reading (which is the text that will appear if
there is anything in the field ) to be bold and the content of the field to
be italics (i.e., it's a book title so it should be).

Ex:
Required Reading (in bold): How to use excel, by So and So (in italics)

thanks for your help, if this can work. it would be GREAT!


Meg


"Microsoft Public Groups" wrote in message
...
Assuming you are using

{ MERGEFIELD myfield \b "beforetext: " }

I don't think you can achieve the formatting you need using that technique
(even replacing "beforetext" by "{ QUOTE beforetext: \*Charformat } and
formatting the Q the way you want does not work).

Instead, try

{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD myfield }" = "" "" "beforetext:: { MERGEFIELD
myfield\*Charformat }" }

then format beforetext: the way you want it and format the M of the second
MERGEFIELD the way you want it.

Ensure all the {} are ht especial field code braces you can insert using
ctrl-F9

Peter Jamieson

"********Meg" wrote in message
...
I recently learned (very happily, I might add) to edit a mail merge field
to include text before or after that field. Another fabulous feature is
that the text will not appear if there is no data in the datasource for
that particular record. This is a very cool feature. (office 2003)

However, I want to format both the text that is before the field and the
actual data in the field (one would be bold and one would be italics)
When I change the info in my form, it looks good, but when I do the
merge,
all of the formatting disappears. If I italicize the information in the
data source document , it looses it's formatting as well.

any ideas?

thanks

--
Meg