[James]

Unfortnately I cant get at the data source as it comes from a 3rd party
application and we can't run macros either (for "security" reasons).
Nevertheless, your main suggestion re aligning table cells works perfectly!
I'm very grateful.
Thanks
James

"Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote:

The best place to manipulate data is in the data source.

You cannot use Left, Right etc. in a merge field and there is no formatting
switch that can be used to cause only the numerals to be displayed.

The only possible way of doing it is if you have the data being inserted
into the cells of table and have the paragraph containing the mergefield
right aligned with a negative right indent in the paragraph definition that
causes the unwanted part of the data to "disappear" out the right-hand side
of the cell.

Of course, after executing the merge, you could use EditReplace to replace
the unwanted part of the data with nothing.

--
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

"James" wrote in message
...
Hi - My mergefield returns a string whicih is a random number from 1 to a
million but with four characters at the end. Eg 12345.fed or 1.fed, etc.
I'd
like to remove the .fed suffix and just display the numbered portion of
the
mergefield. Can i do this?
Many thanks
James