Microsoft Office Forums - View Single Post - [Solved] Date not transfering to mail merge correctly

macropod · 07-01-2011, 05:30 AM

Hi Tony,

To get the date format you want, you can add a formatting picture switch as follows:
• select the mergefield;
• press Shift-F9 to expose the field coding. It should look something like {MERGEFIELD MyDate} where 'MyDate' is your mergefield's name;
• delete anything appearing after the mergefield's name and add '\@ "d MMMM yyyy"' to the field, as in {MERGEFIELD MyDate \@ "d MMMM yyyy"}. With this switch your date will come out as '2 August 2008'. Other possible date formatting switches include:
. \@ "dddd, d MMMM yyyy";
. \@ "ddd, d MMMM yyyy";
. \@ "d MMM yyyy";
. \@ "dd/MMM/yyyy";
. \@ "d-MM-yy";
Note: Note: you can swap the d, M, y expressions around, but you must use uppercase 'M's for months - lowercase 'm's are for minutes.
• position the cursor anywhere in this field and press F9 to update it;
• run your mailmerge.

One thing you'll notice if you're using ordinary date fields in the mailmerge main document is that the date in the output document will update if you re-open the document at a later date, which can be problematic. There is a simple way to prevent this - embed the Date field in the mailmerge main document in a QUOTE field. To do this, simply select the date field, press Ctrl-F9 to embed it in another field, and type 'QUOTE' inside the left field brace, so that you end up with {QUOTE 'date field'}. With the QUOTE field, the date field will automatically unlink when the mailmerge output document is created.