OT: another windows / office 2003 oddity

[Tim Streater]

Using some flavour of Windows today. Probably 7 since it was helpfully asking me to allow it up upgrade to 10. And using Office 2003. The machine was set with the UK locale and so had UK-style dates showing in the Date/Time Control Panel.

Anyway - doing a mailmerge. The spreadsheet had a column with dates in it, which for display in Excel was set to a custom format, probably dd/mm/yyyy.

I needed the date from that column to appear in the mailmerged letter. But Word insisted on showing it as mm/dd/yyyy. I couldn't find any Word setting that might change that.

Anyone have any suggestion as to why? In the end I moved the column of dates to a new column (W in this case), and in the old column I put:

=TEXT(W2,"dd-mmm-yyyy")

in every cell (with the corresponding column-W cell number). I then marked the original column as containing text and Word then merged that correctly. Nice to have a workaround but even nicer to fix the problem.

[Richard]

This'll probably be what you're after:

[Tim Streater]

Mind you, I'm not sure about the field codes business. He has them looking like this:

{ mergefield MyDate }

whereas I'm sure the ones I was looking at were like > but perhaps that is because the merge doc had been prepared on a Mac using Office 2008.