Date format changes when doing a mail merge

Question

I am using Word & Excel 2007 and am currently trying to do a mail merge.  I have a DOB field in excel and the date format throughout the excel spreadsheets are dd/mm/yy.  When i do the mail merge the DOB date appears as m/dd/yy. Any suggestions as how to change it to the dd/mm/yy format.

Thanks

Keiley

Answer 1

Right-click the merge field.

Select Toggle Field Codes from the popup menu.

You'll see something like { MERGEFIELD "DOB" \* MERGEFORMAT }

Change the latter part so that it looks like { MERGEFIELD "DOB" @ "dd/MM/yyyy" }

Press F9 to hide the field code and to update the result.

Answer 2

Thank you so much, this has been driving me nuts trying to work it out.

Answer 3

I'm replying to my own question.. hahah..

Found a way... in my source data (excel format), I formatted the dates to 'Long Date'. When I check my mail merge document, all the dates were correct (dd/MM/yyyy). But I guess this only works if the source data is only meant as a source and not as a presentation, coz it would look weird with the 'long date' format.

Answer 4

Thanks a lot this will held me a lot in work.

Answer 5

It works for some cells but some didn't work.

And the funniest part was it works for some data and some not in the same cell!

Any idea how to resolve this? I contemplated changing it to MM/dd/yyyy, and the results was dd/MM/yyyy for the problem data. However, for the data with no issues, all reverted to MM/dd/yyyy!