See the following Knowledgebase article:

"Month and day are not displayed in the order that you expect in a mail
merge document linked to an external data source in Word 2002"

at

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327579/

Peter Jamieson

"George Mathew" wrote in message
...
I am using MS Word 2002 and MS Excel 2002. My control panel Regional
& Language settings has the date format set d MMM yy. I am having
trouble merging date fields from the worksheet into a Word Document.
Other threads on a similar subject relate to formatting of the output.
My problem is that in some instances the data coming across from the
worksheet is being currupted, by being read as American format and
displaying as the wrong date. The date 11 01 2005 in the worksheet
comes across to the Word document as 1 November 2005 (it should be 11
January 2005) and I can display that November date in any one of
several formats using different date pictures but it will not display
as a January date. Interestingly, the date 17 01 2005 displays in
Word as a 17 January 2005 (correctly) because, it seems, it knows
there are only 12 months in a year so the 17 must be the day and the
other numer the month, I can actually solve the problem by changing
my regional date setting to MMM dd yyyy but then my whole computer is
set up using a format that is quite alien to me. Can anyone help me
to force the data to be read correctly.