How can I get excel to mail merge zip codes plus 4 correctly?

[Kathy at Sauder Feeds]

I have tried everything to get an excel spreadsheet that contains customer
addresses to merge with either Word or Publisher and retain the zip code plus
4 on some of the customers. The customers that have a 5 digit zip code come
through correctly, but the ones that have the plus 4 zip code come through
with a 0 in the zip code fields and nothing else. I have messed with the
formatting function within Excel to no avail. I tried creating my own format
to no avail. I have been online searching this topic and tried the
suggestion of putting the format for the entire column as
[<=99999]00000;00000-000. This did not work either. If anyone has a
suggestion on how to get the 2 types of zip codes to merge into one document
correctly, PLEASE let me know. Thank you!

 

[David McRitchie]

Hi Kathy,
You really want those zip codes as text ALL of them. Then your US
zipcodes are all left justified text as they should be and you can include the
zipcodes used by any country.. Canadian addresses look practically the
same as the US except for zipcodes and you would be able to handle them.
as well.

I can't tell from your description what you have and what you got
the important test is =ISTEXT(F4)

Normally if you enter zip codes the zip+4 would be text, and
you formatted numbers as 00000

FixUSzip5() corrects US 5-digit zipcodes by conversion to 5 digit numbers as text.
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/join.htm#fixUSzip5
format the column as text before running the macro

Mail Merge
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/mailmerg.htm

BTW,

History page source on your website --
&nbsp;&nbsp;&amp;nbspThis year

Whoever does the webpage should make a global change
&nbsp;&nbsp;&amp;nbsp
to:
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
or pehaps to (avoiding the indented paragraph look):

and then perhaps change all of
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; to <P>
which would be easier to read.