[Year 12 IPM] Mail merge with Word XP

[Mark Kelly]

After battling with bugs in Word XP's mail merge for two days (for U2O1 
and U4O1), I think I have made some progress.

Those who use merge may have noticed that before Word XP, merge used to 
honour the formatting used in an Excel data file, e.g. if you format a 
number to one decimal place in Excel, the merged field in Word also 
showed one dp.

However, with Word XP, Microsoft "improved" things, and Word no longer 
saw or used the number formatting applied in the source data.

What a pain that became!

The only choice now was to manually format all number fields in the Word 
form file using numeric picture field switches (e.g. {MERGEFIELD 
"income" \# "$#,##0.00"}

I have found an easier fix: force Word to open data sources the way it 
used to in the past, using DDE rather than OLEDB.  It's not hard, and 
it's described in my updated "Mail Merge for Word XP" tutorial (version 
9) zipped and attached (50K).

Hope it helps

Mark

-- 
Mark Kelly
Manager - Information Systems
McKinnon Secondary College
McKinnon Rd McKinnon 3204, Victoria Australia
Phone +613 95780844  Fax +613 95789253
http://www.mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au
IPM Lecture notes: http://vceit.com
Moderator: IPM Mailing List

I'm often spick, but never span.
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