I have in Excel a text field that contains unformated Medicare numbers, ie
123456789A. In a mail merge, using that field, I want the display to look
like 123-45-6789A.

You are not going to be able to format the field in Word while the 'A' is
present in the number. Create a new column in the Excel table and separate
the number from the letter, then you can combine the fields to produce the
layout eg
{MergeField MediNumber \# "000'-'00'-'0000"}{Mergefield Suffix}

See http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

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


Code Doctor wrote:
I have in Excel a text field that contains unformatted Medicare
numbers, ie 123456789A. In a mail merge, using that field, I want the
display to look like 123-45-6789A.

See "Formatting Word fields with switches" on fellow MVP Graham Mayor's
website at

http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm

But that may not work in your case because of the alpha-numeric data in
Excel.

As a result, you may have to insert the hyphens into the data in Excel,
which can be done by use of a formula

Left(cellreference, 3)&"-"&Mid(cellreference, 4, 2)&"-"&Right(cellreference,
5)

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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

"Code Doctor" Code wrote in message
...
I have in Excel a text field that contains unformated Medicare numbers, ie
123456789A. In a mail merge, using that field, I want the display to look
like 123-45-6789A.