[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

I guess that in the first part of your post you are referring to the use of
an If...then...Else field construction. While you can use a \* charformat
switch to control the appearance of the result of a field by apply the
formatting to the first letter of the field construction, that format will
be applied to the whole of the field and you cannot have half of it one way
and half another way.

If my assumption of the If...then...Else fields is correct, you may be able
to use multiple fields (not nested) to control and format the text before
the merge field itself, the format of the merge field itself and the format
of the text that comes after the merge field.

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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

"********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

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Meg