If you want to use the output of that custom format, use
=TEXT(A1,"00000-0000")
--
David Biddulph

"William" wrote in message
...
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,