[Graham Mayor]

Acharn wrote:
I hate being forced to "top post".

No one is forcing you to do anything. Top or bottom posting is a choice, but
top posting is more convenient to read as the current text is at the top -
and is the default for Outlook Express which most of the regular
contributors to this forum use.

Anyway, thanks for this very helpful answer. The referenced article
has some *very* good stuff, and I'm grateful to find out the reason
for the change in behavior. The developers may not consider this
"broken", but I had never seen any mention of the change and was
taken by surprise. I spent a couple of days floundering until I
remembered the possibility of using a display switch.

The function was changed in Word 2002 so has been around a long time.

Incidentally, the numeric switch I mentioned, "\# ####;'';''",
displays alphabetic characters as well as numbers, if the data field
is not blank, and suppresses the 0.

It is the latter part of the switch after the second colon that suppresses
the 0. The hashes as you have them make no account of thousands separators
and the first quote should go between \# and # thus \# "# if you wish to use
this construct.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org