Hi bigUKfan,

Although DDE can preserve formatting, it's also a whole lot less capable than the default OLE DB provider Word 2002 & later use. For starters, with an Excel data source, it only works with the first worksheet and won't accept named ranges. The use of field switches also means your mailmerge output can be independent of the data format. Without that, you'd need have separate fields in the data source for every data format you wanted to use.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]