[Jef Bray]

I have several MS Word documents that contain a high concentration of merge
fields (each document has upwards of 80-150 merge fields).

As experienced mail-merge users already know, formatting is not retained
from the data source, so I am expected to provide formatting instructions via
merge field "switches" such as \# $#,###.00 right within the merge field code
itself. This is fine for documents with just a few fields to adjust, but I'm
looking at hundreds and hundreds of fields here.

My problem is that typing formatting switches into each individual merge
field, one at a time, is very labour-intensive for documents such as mine. Is
there a way to apply these switches en-masse or perform some sort of search &
replace, taking merge field code into account?

It just seems very odd to me that a mature product such as MS Word butchers
decimal numbers so horribly (e.g. 40.1 is expressed as either
40.09999999999999 or as 40.10000000000000000001) and provide no way of
formatting these, except individually & manually.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

ps: I am using SQL Server as a datasource, not that this should matter. The
datatype of the fields in question is "float"