Change mail-merge date format in Excel

Q All the dates are appearing in the wrong format when I take information from an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document using mail merge. They are set to 'dd/mm/yyyy' in Excel but appear in the American 'mm/dd/yyyy' format in the Word document.

I have double-checked all the Region settings in both Windows and Office and they are all correctly set to the UK. The Excel column is also correctly formatted as a date. I have Microsoft Office 2003.

Khalid Hasan

A We were also perplexed when we looked at this problem. We recreated the problem on our computer although the Windows and Office Regional settings were all correct.

The fix is to tell Word how to format the date in the mail merge document. Follow the mail merge wizard until Step 5 ‘Preview your letters’. You will see the date in the document in the incorrect format.

Press Alt and F9 together and the date text will be replaced by some different text:
{ MERGEFIELD “date” }

Click inside this grey text and add the following text:
{ MERGEFIELD “date” \@”DD/MM/YYYY”\*Mergeformat}

Press Alt and F9 again to return to the preview of the merged field. You can use different date codes for different fields.

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