This is probably an Excel format problem but the difficulties arise with the mail merge.

I have a 10000 named spreadsheet. The address for the customer is Address 1 (House Number); Address 2 (Street name): Town; County; Postcode
This is standard UK address format.

I have no problems with 95% of the records as the address is , for example,



2 Smith Street etc

These records mail merge fine

However there are certain addresses which may be alpha/numeric - 2b or Flat 4. These don't sort properly but finish up at the end of the street. That doesn't matter. BUT when I merge, they merge not as 2b but as 0 which is a real PITA having to manually correct.

I have tried to format as general, numeric and text and get no difference.
Is there any way that I can get the proper address over.

Hi Tony,

That suggests you have the street Nos in their own field/column. If so, what's happening is that Word has looked at the first 10-15 rows of data and determined that the data are numeric. Consequently, when it gets to a field with alpha characters, it evaluates it as 0, numerically. You can probably resolve the matter by changing your data sort order so that the alpha-numeric addresses are at the top of the list. Alternatively, you could add some rows of dummy data, then exclude them from the merge.

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

Hi Paul

Thanks for your thoughts but I'm not sure that's a way out.
Let's fill in tyhe background a bit:

I'm creating labels for a leaflet delivery so it's quite important for the guys that they're in some kind of order otherwise it's a pre-sort . The label goes something like this

1st - Text message
2nd - Field 1(the house number) space Field 2 (Street)
3rd - Town
4th - Postcode

The Excel spread gives the right info so why doesn't Word just do as it's told and dump the contents of Field 1 instead of trying to outthink me?

I really don't understand!
Suppose I extract the data - just Cont C the contents of the 4 fields into a new spread and then reformat all of it as text - or am I better off going into Access?

I've simplified the spread - it's about 30 or so fields but I just copy the relevant records into a new spread and work from that. As this is a weekly job, this manual re-write of the offending labels albeit in the merge is the real time-consumer.

Thanks

Tony

Hi Tony,

You can have the Excel data sorted in one order and have the mailmerge process the data in the reverse order.

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