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Jef Bray[_2_] Jef Bray[_2_] is offline
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Default How do I make mass format changes to mail merge fields?

Graham,
Thank you for your reply. Yes, all of the merge fields in question end with
"_Perc" and need to be rounded to one decimal place.

The macro you speak of, is it simple enough to post an example here? *smile*

I'm a .NET developer but am completely brand new to MS Word macros.

Thanks
Jef

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

If you can define the parameters around which switches are added to which
fields then it should be fairly simple to create a macro to add the switches
to the fields.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org



Jef Bray wrote:
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"