I recently had a case where one of my colleagues was performing a mail merge from an Excel document. All the dates were showing in the American format. In Excel, the dates were in the UK format but when the data came across in the mail merge they were changed to month day rather than day month.
This guide will show you how you can change the date format to the UK format, but the process would be identical if you need to format the date to any other format.
- Open Word and run through the Mail Merge wizard.
- Insert all of your fields
- At step 4 “Write you letter” right-click you date field and select “Toggle Field Codes”
- Your field will now appear like this {MERGEFILED “Date”} where Date is the name of your filed (column heading in Excel).
- After the field name and before the end curly bracket add a space and the string \@ “dd/MM/yy”
Before:
Afterwards:
- Right-click on your field again and select “Toggle Field Codes” to get back to the normal view.
- Repeat for any other date fields.
- Preview and finish your mail merge now with UK dates
Appreciate the assistance. Field was appearing as 5 digit number only. Had to use source information with data in columns in date format, format original input data as a table so word was not a referencing mixed data, or any data in the column not seen to be a date, such as a reference pulling data from another spreadsheet(this just didn’t work). Dates must be entered as a date initially for this to work as referencing formula in 2nd spreadsheet caused data to not be recognised as dates. After referencing directly to word only original dates input in first spreadsheet (already saved as a table [Ctrl+T] so top row wasn’t seen as text), then finally adding the field codes worked.
This had been working for us for a few months and now doesn’t seem to work at all, not sure why, any other suggestions?
Make sure you don’t have any errant spaces where they should not be, or that you have added the correct spacing per the format. That seems to be the trick when I can’t get these to work.
Thanks guys, works perfectly. That was driving me nuts!