format numbers in merge fields (2003sp3)

Topic

New Reply

Hello, nice people, it’s me again….
I’m doing a mailmerge letter with about ten money numbers in it. The data source is an excel spreadsheet where the numbers are formatted like £27.31, £3,456.67 and £188.40
I want the numbers in the letters to display as they do in the datasource.
I’ve read the Help about switches in field codes, like # $#,###.00, but am getting unreliable results, in particular, losing the 2nd decimal place it it’s zero.
A little hand-holding, lease?
Thanks

Reply | Quote

Replies

oh, and to add insult to injury, a former version of Word had a drop-down list in the mailmerge toolbar showing the fields in the datasource.
Mine’s gone AWOL and I can’t find how to get it back.
Not a show-stopper, but I’d welcome it back!

Reply | Quote

1. Select Tools | Customize…
2. Activate the Toolbars tab.
3. Make sure that the Mail Merge toolbar is visible.
4. Activate the Commands tab.
5. Select the Mail Merge category.
6. Locate Insert Merge Field in the list of commands (it has an arrow to the right of it)
7. Drag it to the Mail Merge toolbar.
8. Close the Customize dialog.

The Insert Merge Field dropdown is the dropdown list used to insert merge fields in Word 2000 and before.

Reply | Quote

Thank you very much, Hans, both work fine (of course…)
I prefer the alternative method for formatting the numbers, as I sort of understand it.
But your instructions for the ‘modify field code’ method are greatly superior to those in Help.
Thanks again.

(BTW, I did search the Wod bit of this site for ‘format numbers in mailmerge’ but drew a blank. Maybe something on how best to use the Lounge’s Search facility could be helpful to supplicants, and create less work for the nice people like you?)

Reply | Quote

Just like with searching in Google, determining the best search terms is a strange mixture of knowledge, intuition and luck.

The search function in the Lounge is not intelligent, so it takes a bit more work to get the desired results. In this particular case, it’s better to use number than numbers because searching for number will return all occurrences of numbers but also all occurrences of number without an s. And it’s better to use mail merge instead of mailmerge for similar reasons. These changes result in much more “hits”. To restrict them again, I would have added excel to the search terms, i.e. I would have searched for format number mail merge excel. The post I referred to is not far from the top of the resulting list.

Reply | Quote

See the second method in post 641,008.

Reply | Quote