Dates as text in Mail merges
 

In Word:
Select the mergefield that contains your date
Press Shift-F9
Modify it so it looks like this

{MERGEFIELD OrderDate \@ "dddd, MMMM d, yyyy" }

replacing OrderDate with the name of your date field. Formatting switches
are explained in Word's Help file:

Date-Time format switch
The Date-Time format switch (\@) specifies the display of a date or time.

For example, the switch \@ "dddd, MMMM d, yyyy" in the field { DATE \@
"dddd, MMMM d, yyyy" } displays "Friday, November 23, 2007." Combine the
following date and time instructions €” day (d), month (M), and year (y);
hours (h) and minutes (m) €” to build a date-time format. You can also include
text, punctuation, and spaces.



"Candida" wrote:

Hi, I'm trying to do a mail merge between a Word Document and an Excel
spreadsheet. I'm using the latest ('07) versions of both programs.

I have several columns of dates in my data (such as original; billing date,
due date, etc.) I have them formatted as dates in Excel. My problem is
that when I do the merge, Word reads them as numbers such as 38982 or the
like. I have tried converting the date columns to text in Excel, but then ALL
the dates look like their serial numbers. How can I get around this?