Hi Kerry:

The simplest thing I can suggest is "convert your fractions to decimals".

Let me preface that by saying that I have never attempted to bring formatted
fractions from Excel to Word in Data Merge. However, my understanding of
the problem is that Data Merge sends data from source to destination as
plain text. Formatting is stripped, and Word does not have a "fractions"
numeric picture switch like Excel does, so there is no way to get them from
Excel to Word.

I hope I am wrong: I have cross-posted this message to the group that
specialises in Data Merge, so check back on Monday to see if anyone knows
how to do this. Data Merge is a specialist area! And we need to be aware
that the advanced VBA functions they have on the PC to deal with these sorts
of things are not available in Mac Word. (It's Word 97-level VBA, guys...)

So, somehow you have to represent your data in a form that can be described
in plain text.

What you "could" do is add two columns in Excel that expresses the fractions
numerator and denominator as plain text: so you would find 11 | 16 or
24 | 32 in those two columns. That *will* come across.

But once you get the data into Word, you would then have the problem of
converting the text data back into formatted fractions. Since Word doesn't
HAVE formatted fractions, this involves an Equation field.

Look up the Help for the EQ field. For example, { EQ \f(11,16) } will
display:
11
___
16

So if you had {EQ \f({ MERGEFIELD numerator },{MERGEFIELD denominator } } in
your main document, it might work. You would have to format the font to be
small enough so that it would not look silly (start with half the point size
of the surrounding text).

I am sorry, I cannot remember whether the Data Merge operation passes field
codes from the Main Document to the Output Document. I suspect it doesn't.
If that is the case, you need to bring the EQ field into the output document
as text. In other words, "type" the OUTER set of curly braces in the Main
document.

Then complete your merge and run a macro to convert the typed EQ fields into
"real" EQ fields. This is, barely, possible. But it's weeks of programming
unless you know AppleScript *really* well. If you are interested in this
approach, get back to us here. If I hunt around, I think I have a VBA
example that creates fields from plain text. But be warned, this is *not* a
simple operation. At least, it wasn't for me :-)

Sorry!

On 18/3/06 9:57 PM, in article , "Kerry
O'Shannessy" wrote:

Using Excel as Data source, when I merge data to word, I loose my formatted
fractions. No explicit Field switches that I can see for setting fractions.

Program has been working fine on a PC. Have been using Office 95 but after
researching Macintosh, decided to upgrade in this direction.

And Yes, no Fractions is a problem. There must be a way, can somebody help.

Mike


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John McGhie
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410