It seems to me that a space is replace by an underscore, an underscore is
retained and other punctation type separators that I tried (' # & , etc) are
deleted.

I do not know of any source of rules on this and quite frankly, I am
surprised that field names that do not conform to the norms (from say the
dBase days) are not just rejected.

--
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

wrote in message
oups.com...
Thank you again, Doug,
bvut the problem is that I have to manage the documents in ana
application, not me manually. That is, I have to instruct my
application (which now creates the single, merged documents, by merging
the record values of the Excel file into the merge fields of the Word
documents), I have to instruct my application in order to have it
AUTOMATICALLY "know" which Word merge field corresponds to which Excel
header.
Thus, I really cannot edit the files by hand (my work would change,
from computer programmer to Excel document editor, LOL).
I ahve to know the general rule that tells me "when you have an Excel
header field with spaces and dots, then its is replaced, in the
corresponding Word document merge field, with a string made of.....
etc".
I'm sure that Microsoft people know exactly this rule, because they
wrote the programs (i.e. Word and Excel) which do this mapping
automatically.

Thank you for your help (and any further help)
Alessio