Here is an article on mail merging to XL. You can switch your merge to DDE to
get the formats to come through but there are some things about DDE that you
should read up on first. I would go with Gary''s solution or some version as
such. It converts the zip code to text and that will come through just fine...

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk/t0003.htm

I would use this formula...
=if(A199999, text(a1, "00000-0000"), text(a1, "00000"))
--
HTH...

Jim Thomlinson


"William" wrote:

Thanks for the ideas. It seems as there is no solution yet. The formatting
suggestions do produce 00001-0000 when there are only 5 digits in a cell.
And Jim's custom format solves that, but cannot be used in a mail merge.

I wonder if there is a way to use Jim's custom formula, and then find a way
for the format to come through the merge?
--
William


"Gord Dibben" wrote:

FormatCellsNumberSpecial Zip + 4


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:50:01 -0700, William
wrote:

I have a column with nine-digit zip codes, but there is no hyphen separating
the final zip four numbers. I need to use this column in a mail merge, but
don't want to go in and manually add all the hypens. There must be a way to
do this (Find/Replace using placeholders?) but I can't quite come up with it.
Ideas?

Thanks,