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#1
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Entry of dates is changing when pulled into merged document
I have a word document that I am pulling info from an excel spreadsheet to
populate the form. One of the columns in my spreadsheet is for the date I recieve a particular piece of info from clients. Sometimes, the clients will send more than one of thse pieces of info. When I recieve this info on more than one date, I've been putting a comma between the two dates. Even though in my spreadsheet, the column looks like this "3/2/2009, 12/29/2009" (for the two dates I received the different info), when I pull the data from this particular column into my word form, it changes the dates to something like 12:00AM. I've tried changing the formatting of this column in the spreadsheet to text and also to general; I've also tried putting an apostrophe in front of the entry, but it still will not give me just the two dates. In short, I want the spreadsheet and the word document to treat this one column as text and enter it exactly the way I have it...with the two dates separated by the comma. Any ideas? |
#2
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Entry of dates is changing when pulled into merged document
It is likely that the mechanism that Word uses to get data from Excel
(probably OLE DB) is treating your column as a date column because it has only "1 date cells", or mostly "1 date cells" in the first 8 cells of the column. In that case it will treat non-dates (e.g. "2 date cells" in the way you describe. Once you've entered the date, Excel won't treat it as "text" even if you change the cell format, until you clear and re-enter the value (or something like that). However, you may be able to change the entire column to text format as follows: - select the column - select the Data|Text to Columns... menu option - click Next through the wizard until you reach Step 3 of 3, then select Text as the Column Data Format. If you are using Excel 2007, Text to Columns in the Data Tools group on the Data tab. The above quote comes from http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk/t0003.htm which probably provides more detail than you need. Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk On 30/12/2009 14:13, Jo4321 wrote: I have a word document that I am pulling info from an excel spreadsheet to populate the form. One of the columns in my spreadsheet is for the date I recieve a particular piece of info from clients. Sometimes, the clients will send more than one of thse pieces of info. When I recieve this info on more than one date, I've been putting a comma between the two dates. Even though in my spreadsheet, the column looks like this "3/2/2009, 12/29/2009" (for the two dates I received the different info), when I pull the data from this particular column into my word form, it changes the dates to something like 12:00AM. I've tried changing the formatting of this column in the spreadsheet to text and also to general; I've also tried putting an apostrophe in front of the entry, but it still will not give me just the two dates. In short, I want the spreadsheet and the word document to treat this one column as text and enter it exactly the way I have it...with the two dates separated by the comma. Any ideas? |
#3
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Entry of dates is changing when pulled into merged document
Thank you, as far as I can tell that seems to have done the trick!
Jo "Peter Jamieson" wrote: Once you've entered the date, Excel won't treat it as "text" even if you change the cell format, until you clear and re-enter the value (or something like that). However, you may be able to change the entire column to text format as follows: - select the column - select the Data|Text to Columns... menu option - click Next through the wizard until you reach Step 3 of 3, then select Text as the Column Data Format. If you are using Excel 2007, Text to Columns in the Data Tools group on the Data tab. The above quote comes from http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk/t0003.htm which probably provides more detail than you need. |
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