I've uninstalled and reinstalled and checked settings. Problem still there. I will try and download updates to Office 2003 if there are any and see if that makes a difference. Thanks for your help.

No problem, It's a shame I can't recreate the problem. Let me know how you get on with the updates.

Problem resolved. It is a "feature" of Mail Merge that all dates are imported to the Word document in US American format. To switch the date back to UK format you have to use the Format Merged Data using switch formatting on all date fields. If you Alt and F9 you will see the MergeFormat Field on your Word document. If you type \@"dd/MM/yyyy" at the end of the field the date is displayed in that format. NB type as seen i.e with quote marks and the month format must be in upper case for it to work.

Great, thanks for the update Jim I am sure that will come in handy for future readers

I know it's a 'year later'..but your solution saved so much of my time. Thanx a lot for your answer, D-A-L...I would have never thought of using capitals for the month...duh....It was soooo useful.

It's not the end - at least in Office 2002 SP1, Mail Merge seems to process dates as text format internally even when exporting from database and spreadsheet formats!!! Which means that a good amount of dates will be formatted wrong in non-US locales - for example, January 5, 2006 will be shown as 5/1/2006 by default, and if you apply the format token "\@ d MMMM yyyy", it becomes May 1, 2006!

You can avoid this by exporting to Microsoft Word Merge text format (.txt + schema.ini) - it does seem to respect current locale settings, so the dates appear correct, but it does not support quote marks in text strings - they show as \" in merge fields... Good work, Microsoft - one pitfall after another

Here's one final definitive solution - use DDE provider!

http://wordprocessing.about.com/od/u...t/exceldde.htm

Retaining Excel Formats in Mail Merge

Quick Tip
From James Marshall,
Your Guide to Word Processing.

Getting the formatting right when you use an Excel data source for mail merge can be extremely frustrating. There are ways to correct the formatting by using switches in the field codes, but it can be a time-consuming and frustrating exercise. Fortunately, there is an easy way to circumvent the use of switches and still have your data appear as you would like it.

1. With the main document open, click the Tools menu
2. Select Options…
3. On the General tab, select Confirm Conversion at Open
4. Click OK

When you select an alternate data source such as Excel, it will ask you to choose the type of data source.

When present with the choice, select MS Excel Files via DDE.

When you merge the document with the data source, the formatting from the Excel data source will be retained.

This way, date does not change when applying format token, and it works with Access tables as well (I was able to see all the queries in a database, while OLE link was only showing tables for some reason).

BUT I wasn't able to change the formatting of Currency field - I tried to remove a currency symbol, but it just didn't let me specify number-ony format. They gotta be kidding...

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Dmitry
thank you so much for this. i have been fighting with this for literally months. my problem was the first part of the mont say 1st june to about the 10th would be the US format of mm/dd then it would change to the aussie/uk version dd/mm. very rarely a customer would pick me up on this when receiving mail. Now i have it fixed thank you so much

I wonder if there are any improvements to the handling of Mail Merge data formats in Word 2007? I recall that DDE data provider was going to be deprecated, and if Microsoft didn't fix the behaviour of processing date formats as text...

Thank you Jimbarnham for your message on 27 March 2005. What you stated has worked for me, whereas I found the other messages did not (however, I am using Word 2007).