Your best bet is to manipulate the data in Excel. If the firstname is in a
separate column, just use a formula that uses the Left() function.

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Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
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Doug Robbins - Word MVP
"murfitUK" wrote in message
...
I am using an Excel spreadsheet for my mail merge into Word.

How can I get Word to print only the first character of a field? I have
had a look at the switches in the help files but can't find what I'm
looking for.

The data in the spreadsheet is in the format:

Mr John Smith address etc
Mrs Ann Brown address etc

and I would like Word to print the letters:

Mr J Smith
address
etc

Mrs A Brown
address
etc

Is it possible? Thanks for your help.