Excel to Word, Office 2007, Win 7 64 bit.

I am a fairly competent excel and word user. I have an excel workbook with a number of sheets, and use this as the data source to populate address fields of some word docs based on a selection. This all works just fine 98% of the time. But, every so often, the mail merge doesn't pick up a field correctly, and I cannot fix it.

Right now, I have a "middle initial" field, and it worked just fine until recently, and now it always merges as a time field: 12:00:00 AM . It shows up just fine in the spreadsheet. It doesn't matter what the middle initial is, it always shows up as midnight in that format. I have been working around it by merging to a doc and editing the initial.

I have tried recreating the column in excel setting format as "text" and pasting as value from the original column, also copying using formula from original column and then copying THAT column, and at the same time recreating the word doc that is grabbing the data through mail merge, but nothing seems to work.

It has also happened with a zip code field, where if I entered the zip code into a "clean" cell, it would always show up as a "0" in the mail merge, and I am still using the work-around for that -- copying another zip code field into the new cell, then entering the correct zip code. Yes, I tried all of the above, tried rebuilding the mail merge, etc.

Ideas?

Mary