kingswood,

I hope you don't mind me jumping in with an alternative, and a question?

Mr. Edstein's response is very cool, he clearly is a very experienced OFFICE user, which I am not. I'm not very comfortable writing this type of procedure in WORD, I can't seem to remember the proper syntax and / or function keys to get there, however I'm a little more comfortable working in EXCEL. I do a lot of mail merges for creating golf scorecards and scoresheets where the handicaps sometimes need special formatting. I have taken to creating a new column in EXCEL using the text function to get what I want, and using it as the merge field.

The solution I use is to create the additional field "Petitioner_Att_Bar_Text" in my EXCEL table using the formula

= TEXT(Petitioner_Att_Bar,"$###,##0.00;-$###,##0.00;")

and using that field in the mail merge.

Mr. Edstein, is there a downside to attacking the problem in this manner?

Thanks for allowing me to participate!

Kevin