Thanks, that worked, and it's so simple! Weird that the tome doesn't make it clear. They should change this:

To force DATE fields to convert to their results (ie so that they become static dates), reflecting the date on which the merge was performed, simply embed them in a QUOTE field coded along the lines of:

{QUOTE{DATE}}

To this:

To force DATE fields to convert to their results (ie so that they become static dates), reflecting the date on which the merge was performed, simply embed them in a QUOTE field by pressing Ctrl+F9 twice to get two nested pairs of field braces, and type QUOTE after the first brace and DATE after the 2nd brace, like this:

{QUOTE{DATE}}

The 'they' in this case is me, and I'm not inclined to make that example inconsistent with the rest of the examples in the thread. The instructions in that example, if followed correctly, will produce the same result as the workaround I gave you.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Interesting how it becomes uneditable, even in the original doc, after doing a merge. So if you want to just change the date formatting, you have to scrap it and start over. Or is there a way to make it go back into editable form?