Help!

I've got fields in Excel that I'm merging (via mail merge) into Word. These fields are formatted properly in Excel. For example, I have an "event date" that holds data formatted to display as "January 31, 2010."

When these fields merge into Word, though, the dates change format and show up as, say, "40206."

I thought using a switch would fix me up, but I'm not familiar with them and I'm doing something wrong.

I Alt-F9'd, and changed { MERGEFIELD Event_Date } to

{ MERGEFIELD Event_Date \@ "MMMM DDDD YYYY" }
{ MERGEFIELD Event_Date [\@ "MMMM DDDD YYYY"] }
{ MERGEFIELD Event_Date \@ MMMM DDDD YYYY }
{ MERGEFIELD Event_Date [\@ MMMM DDDD YYYY] }

{ MERGEFIELD Event_Date \# "MMMM DDDD YYYY" }
{ MERGEFIELD Event_Date [\# "MMMM DDDD YYYY"] }
{ MERGEFIELD Event_Date \# MMMM DDDD YYYY }
{ MERGEFIELD Event_Date [\# MMMM DDDD YYYY] }

... nothing is working! Can anyone offer any pointers?

Thank you if so!