Mail Merge

[Roger]

I am using a mail-merge from Word the data source of
which is an Excel spreadsheet containing people's date of
birth.The relevant column has the cells formatted to
display the date as English UK eg 11/06/1949 for June
11th 1949.However when I do the mail merge to include
this information it prints on the letter in American
format eg 6/11/1949. I have changed the language setting
in Word to English UK but it makes no difference.
Can anyone advise please

 

[Lloyd H. London]

I would suggest the following. In Word select Options on the Tools
menu. Go to the General tab and check Confirm Conversion at Open. It
is the fifth check box from the top. This will allow you to choose a
data conversion protocol when you attach the Excel data source to the
Merge document.
Open the Excel files and format the date cells as Date, English (UK),
DD/MM/YYYY. You do not have to change the language settings.
Open the Merge document, and reattach the data file to the main
document. When the Confirm Conversion dialog box opens, choose DDE.
Microsoft has changed the default to OLE DB and it does not consistantly
bring foward the formatting from either Excel or Access (in other words,
they fixed something that wasnt broken, as DDE was the default in prior
versions of Office). DDE will transfer formatting consistently for
Dates, Currency and Percentages.
Run you merge, it worked for me.

 

[Roger]

Thanks will give it a try later on