Hi m&co,

Without knowing how the data appear in the source, it's hard to advise.

For the phone numbers, the issue will likely be that the phone number format in Excel is just a formatted display whereas, if you have an extension in the same column, that will not be a number but a text string. This can lead to problems with mailmerges because, if you don't have text strings in the first few rows, the mailmerge algorithms will assume all the data should be numeric and any text string will be evaluated as 0. What you should have is numbers in one column and extensions in another.

It's also not clear what you mean about data coming from a variety of spreadsheets - Word can only use a single file as a mailmerge data source. Whether text formatting such as bullets will come through largely depends on which data connection method you use. DDE tends to work best at preserving formatting.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]