There's nothing scary about it. You virtually typed the string in the
subject of your post! And if pressing 0 several times is too onerous for you
you could copy and paste them into the field from the web page. DDE may work
(and is mentioned on my web site) but it is not reliable, which is
presumably why Microsoft no longer uses it.
If you had read the link Doug originally posted, which covers this
particular issue, the 10 hours work could have been completed in 10
minutes, and you wouldn't have wasted any envelopes! I really don't know why
we bother!
--
Graham Mayor - Word MVP
My web site
www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site
http://word.mvps.org
John wrote:
I have come to expect 4-5 hour uptime in learning Micorsoft's "simple"
procedures. hitting Cntrl F9 and typing in 16 or 32 digit numbers is
scary.
I checked "confirm Conversion at Open" and choose DDE (I think that's
what it was.) That got the numbers to show up correctly. A trial merge
to the printer showed word still printing 0's instead of the zip code.
So I merged it to documents. After that it worked fine.
So all in all the two hour job only took 10 hours and wasted only
300-400 envelopes. Not too bad for Microsoft and now I've learned yet
another quirk.
John
Doug Robbins - Word MVP wrote:
If all of the zip codes are entered into Excel as 9 digit numbers,
then all that you have to do is use Alt+F9 to toggle on the display
of the field codes and then add the
\# "00000'-'0000"
Switch inside the closing }
If you have a mixture of 5 and 9 digit zip codes then you will have
to use the { IF } field construction that is shown in the article.
Please read the note in bold type at the bottom of the section on
zip codes in the article.
This is not difficult and will work just as well as your last method
which entails more work.