The best place to manipulate the data is in the datasource before executing
the merge. There is however no built-in way of doing it. A macro is your
best bet.



--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

"pschatz100" wrote in message
...
I have created an event badge template using Word 2000 and mail merge
functionality. In order to preserve formatting so they print nicely, I
would
like to limit the number of characters that will print from some of the
merge
fields. For intstance, some people provide long company names when they
register for an event, and I would like to limit the printout to a max of
25
characters.