Desimal place in Word 2003 Mail Merge

h1 Word: Change decimals from Excel data June 18, 2009 When you’re using an Excel spreadsheet for mail merge data in Word, any numbers — such as those for currency — come in in the ‘native’ Excel number format even if you’ve changed the number format for the relevant cells in Excel. From the experimentation I did, a number such as 13733.735 displayed in an Excel cell as 13733.74 but came into Word as 13733.735000000001 — not a very friendly number to work with (and what’s with the 12 decimal places, and where did that 1 come from?). Here’s how it looks in Excel: mail_marge_number01_excel And here’s how it came into Word: mail_marge_number03_word If you want the number in the mail merged document to be displayed differently, e.g. to two decimal places, then you have to add a switch to the mail merge field. Here’s how you do it in Word 2003 (Word 2007 is probably the same, though I haven’t tested it): Insert the mail merge field for the number into the Word document as normal. In this example, the merge field is called Amount. mail_marge_number02_word Right-click on the mail merge field, and select Toggle Field Codes. Put your cursor after the closing “ of the field name (e.g. “Amount” and before the closing } and add a space. Type in the switch: \# 0.0x mail_marge_number04_word Right-click on the mail merge field again, and select Toggle Field Codes. Save the document. The next time you run a mail merge, the number will be in the format you entered at Step 4. (You can quickly test it works by clicking the View Merged Data mail_marge_view button on the Mail Merge toolbar.) mail_marge_number05_word This example shows just one number format switch — experiment with other combinations to get the number format you want. For example, \# 0 for whole numbers; \#0.00x for three decimal places etc. For example: mail_marge_number06_word displays as mail_marge_number07_word. You can get more information from Word’s online Help for all sorts of other things you can do with these field switches — search for numeric picture switch in the Help and expand the Picture Items icon at the end of that topic.