Mail Merge Date Format Problems

[Guest]

Ok I'm running word 2002 and have a document with a mail merge from an
access database. The data in the field of the database is in the format
07/10/2005 and I'm using the follwoing in the word document to merge the data
- {MERGEFIELD Date \@ dd/MMM/yyyy }.

If the data in the database is 07/10/2005 I get the following 10/Jul/2005
If the data in the database is 22/10/2005 I get the following 22/Oct/2005!!!

Any comments to try would be great - the Preserve formatting during updates
box - is unticked.

Cheers

Tony

 

[Tony Jollans]

22/10/2005 is unambiguous: 22 October

07/10/2005 is ambiguous and I'm afraid far too much Microsoft software uses
American rules to resolve ambiguities regardless of international settings.

The easiest solution is probably to change the date format in Access so that
the mail merge can take it as is.

 

[Guest]

What you don't specify is how you _do_ want the date to be formatted, so I am
assuming you want it to show up the same as in Access.

Access stores dates in 'short date' format - month/day/year - , so you
shouldn't need (nor use) any formatting control characters as a part of your
Mergefield code. It should simply read as;

{MERGEFIELD Date}

The control characters you are using are intended for other types of Word
fields in the Date & Time category, not mergefields.

The real problem, however, is that (according to the example you cite) the
Access field is _not_ properly defined as a Date/Time data type. If it were,
_All_ dates in the table would be expressed the same way - either d-m-y _OR_
m-d-y as it is impossible to have some expressed/formatted one way and others
differently.

You'll probably find that the Access field where the "dates" are stored is
actually defined as a Text data type. If so, there is no way to tell whether
7/10/xxxx is supposed to mean July 10th or October 7th, and there isn't much
you can do in Word to fix it... if anything at all.

Regards |:>)