Hi Nolan,

Sorry about getting back to you so late. I was away for a couple of weeks during
the holidays, and have been running to catch up ever since...

What you're seeing now is due to no longer connecting via DDE. Only DDE brings
across formatting from the data source, because it carries on a conversation
with Excel, rather than just bringing across the data. This means, if you use
ODBC (or OLEDB), you must place the formatting information in the mail merge
fields in Word (prior to the merge). Alt+F9 toggles the field codes on/off. A
formatting switch would look something like this
{ Mergefield Total \# "0.00" }

I think that you may be onto something.
When I made the change, the Word document opened much faster. This has led
to a new problem however. Once I have disconnected from the data file and
reconnected, the merged document has lost all of the formating that was in
the document originally. For example, the dates are in scientifc notation
and the numbers don't read like 100,000 they read 100000. This is another
thing that I noticed when we changed to Office XP - it wasn't very easy to
change the location of the data file. This data file has over 200 columns of
data. The merged document is 35 pages of text and numbers and it would be
extremely tedious to go through and have to reformat this document. Is there
a way to change the data source file and not lose the formating?
Interestingly, the formating is correct in the excel file.


Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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