Hi Paul

Thanks for your thoughts but I'm not sure that's a way out.
Let's fill in tyhe background a bit:

I'm creating labels for a leaflet delivery so it's quite important for the guys that they're in some kind of order otherwise it's a pre-sort . The label goes something like this

1st - Text message
2nd - Field 1(the house number) space Field 2 (Street)
3rd - Town
4th - Postcode

The Excel spread gives the right info so why doesn't Word just do as it's told and dump the contents of Field 1 instead of trying to outthink me?

I really don't understand!
Suppose I extract the data - just Cont C the contents of the 4 fields into a new spread and then reformat all of it as text - or am I better off going into Access?

I've simplified the spread - it's about 30 or so fields but I just copy the relevant records into a new spread and work from that. As this is a weekly job, this manual re-write of the offending labels albeit in the merge is the real time-consumer.

Thanks

Tony