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General discussion

Word 2003 mail merge reading Excel 2003

Sep 15, 2005 7:54AM PDT

I used to be able to do Word 97 mail merge easy without this problem from Excel file as source data like this column named NUM below

NUM
47
52.8
75.6
38
24.1
27.8


but with Word 2003
{ MERGEFIELD ''NUM'' }
will not output like

47
52.799999999999997
75.599999999999994
38
24.100000000000001
27.800000000000001

but so I do
{ MERGEFIELD ''NUM'' \# ''0.0''}
it then

47.0
52.7
75.5
38.0
24.1
27.8

How will I output truncating the ''.0'' with Word 2003 mail merge?

Discussion is locked

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Re: formatting
Sep 15, 2005 6:15PM PDT

Jnavar,

Word uses the format you specify. That seems OK to me.

What I should do: make a new column in Excel. Use IF and FORMAT functions, referring to the old column, to show every value the way you like. Then merge this column into word as a simple text field without any formatting (like a name or address).

Hope this helps.


Kees

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Re: formatting
Sep 16, 2005 2:13AM PDT

I dunno why new Microshaft Word 2003 don't work well just like its older predecessor.

I had to do something sneaky in my Excel source list by creating new column with this formula
=IF(INT(A2)=A2,A2,TEXT(A2,"0.0")) where A2 had the original numeric value, end of the story.

Thanks for replying anyway but I'll keep finding for simple workaround within Microshaft Word 2003. Happy

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Re: formatting
Sep 16, 2005 3:15AM PDT

You hadn't told this worked in Office 2003 in another way than in older versions. So I couldn't react on that.
Apparently, somebody at Microsoft thought this to be an improvement. You don't. Why don't you ask them why they did it, and complain about it. Questions about undocumented changes are understandable, and should be taken seriously.

If you are convincing enough they might undo the change in the coming Office 2006, although I don't expect so in this case.

Kees

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CharFormat
Sep 21, 2005 6:34AM PDT

I found the answer to my own posted question....

{ Mergefield FieldName \* CharFormat }

Happy