Hi all,

I hope that someone can offer me some advice.

I have been using an excel (2007) template and a word (2007) template to
create documents for my business using a mail merge. All has been working
well for the last few months.

However, I have an issue that the date that is being input in excel e.g.
17/07/09 is coming out as 40011 (or similar) when the mail merge is complete.
I haven't changed either of the template documents and the cells have been
formatted properly in the excel sheet so there is no reason for this problem.

I have googled it and searched other forums but I cannot find anyone having
the same problem.

Any suggestions would be gratefully recieved as whilst I am not a novice
with computers this has me at a loss!

Excel calculates dates based on the number of days since (I think) Jan 01,
1900. So, Jul 17, 2009 is 40011 days since the first date Excel recognizes.

You have a couple of options, but the most simple one would be to create a
new column in Excel (to use in your merge) and use a formula to force the
date into a string (instead of a number stored behind the scenes).

Assuming your source date is in B2, use something like:
=day(B2) & "/" & month(B2) & "/" & year(B2)

Then use that in your merge. It is also possible that there are settings in
the merge tool that will allow you to specifically format the value as a
date, but I don't use merge so I can't speak to that.

HTH,
Keith


"road2ruin" wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I hope that someone can offer me some advice.
>
> I have been using an excel (2007) template and a word (2007) template to
> create documents for my business using a mail merge. All has been working
> well for the last few months.
>
> However, I have an issue that the date that is being input in excel e.g.
> 17/07/09 is coming out as 40011 (or similar) when the mail merge is complete.
> I haven't changed either of the template documents and the cells have been
> formatted properly in the excel sheet so there is no reason for this problem.
>
> I have googled it and searched other forums but I cannot find anyone having
> the same problem.
>
> Any suggestions would be gratefully recieved as whilst I am not a novice
> with computers this has me at a loss!