Mail merging numbers

[PCOR]

I have a document that I am mail merging with a letter.
The document that is being merged FROM, contains name/street number/street
address etc etc
All works well with the street number as long as the street number is all
numbers(ie 6345 or 1234) but if the address is 123B a zero merges in the
document
Same if the number is 223#34
I did find a way around by concatating the two(Number & Street name) but
would prefer not to have to
Any ideas
Thanks
Ian
Norton Professional 2004 says this email is clean...believe it

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Which version of Word is this? And (probably not relevant, but ...) is the
data in a table in a Word document, in a comma- or tab-delimited
format, or?

 

[PCOR]

I am using Word 2003 and the data is in Excel format (2003)

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Word 2003 will by default use OLEDB to get data from Excel and it will
probably use the first few rows of the data to determine a data type. If it
thinks the data is numeric, you will get the kind of problem you are seeing.

You can try either
a. in Excel, select the column and format the cells as Text (and go through
the Word data source selection process again)
b. revert to the old default DDE connection process - check Word
Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversions at open", go through the data
source selection process again, and select the DDE option when it is
presented.