I have two date fields in an Excel 2016 spreadsheet that will merge only as the numeric date value (e.g. 43159 for 2/28/2018) regardless of the fact that the mergefield switches are set to format the info as mm/dd/yy.
All other date fields in the spreadsheet display correctly in the merge doc. The date cells are all formatted exactly the same in Excel, and the mergefields are switch-formatted the same in the merge document. But for some reason, these particular cells will not display in the merge doc as dates.
I have found a workaround by going to each problem date cell and inserting a ‘ before the date. This effectively makes it a text cell, and the mailmerge formatting will pick up the date and display it properly. This is highly impractical when the number of records is more than just a few.
I cannot determine what is making these Excel data in these particular columns behave differently than the same data in another column. I can literally copy the good cell and paste into the problem cell – formats and all, and the merge doc still bungles the display of the date in the problem column.
I have had this problem since I moved these spreadheets up to Office 2010. When I could use DDE, it was never a problem. But I cannot use DDE to get data from an .xlsx spreadsheet.
Has anybody else had this problem? Or better yet, has anybody who has had this problem found a solution?
Thanks,
Alan
