Microsoft Word Mail Merge issue!

[IronFar]

Doing a list of mailing labels from Excel 2003 onto Word 2003's Mail Merge.

Problem lies in zip codes not showing up right. IE, ordinary ones like 98108 or 78429 will look fine, but for Canadian, British, etc and even some 00298 zip codes will totally screw up and have a "0" in it's field.

Any help in resolving this will be greatly appreciated!

 

[duragezic]

Are the cells with the zip codes in Excel formatted as 'Text'?

 

[IronFar]

Changed the formats all around: Number, Text, General. Nothing's worked.

 

[WW]

so the zips look fine in excel, but don't look right after the merge in Word?

you're saving the excel file, and then running the mail merge wizard in word, use the .xls as the data source, you select the fields and its getting messed up? hmm....maybe try exporting to a csv from excel, and using that in word to see if the formatting is ok.

or they are messed up in excel? if only in excel, make sure you're selecting the whole column, do a Date > Text to Column, and delimited with tab or something NOT in any of the entries, and select text format....see if that helps lock the format in.

 

[Insomnium]

What about playing around with Custom formats? There's a ZIP, and ZIP+4 custom format. You should use one of those for the American zips, but make sure that format is not used for foreign zip code styles, or it will screw things up. Instead, you might want to create custom ZIP formats for these foreign zip codes and apply them to your data. See if this works.

Also, make sure the data is being merged as plaintext. You might want to create a 2nd blank worksheet, copy the entire first worksheet, and then go to the blank one and Paste Special -> Text (or if you see a different screen, choose to have Values only pasted). Then try the merge from this new plaintext worksheet.