May 20, 2016

There are three ways to make your dates and currency show properly in a Microsoft Word mail merge I’ll be showing you way number 1 in this blog and the other 2 in a subsequent blog.

1. Change how the merge connects to the Excel file

In the MS Word mail merge document go:

File – Options – Advanced

Scroll down to the General section, and then tick the box for Confirm file format conversion on open tick box then click on OK

Now start the mail merge and start the mail merge. After you decide on Letters, or Labels, or Envelopes, you’ll need to select the recipients, we’ll get some extra prompts because of the option we just turned on.

In the main document, click Mailings – Select Recipients – Use an Existing List. The browse to your spreadsheet and click on Open.

At this prompt, Tick the Show All tick box and then choose MS Excel Worksheets via DDE (*.xls), and then click on OK.

At this prompt click Entire Spreadsheet, and then click OK.

You can now continue with your mail merge!

Note: To stop Word giving you that prompt every time you open a data file, you can open Word Options menu again and untick the Confirm file format conversion on open tick box after you are done with this mail merge.