From the course: Word: Mail Merge in Depth

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Fix numeric formatting in the data source

Fix numeric formatting in the data source

From the course: Word: Mail Merge in Depth

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Fix numeric formatting in the data source

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- [Instructor] When you're using data that comes from Excel, from SQL Server, from Access from another database, it's not unusual to have numeric data or date data show up differently in our final merge than you might expect. There are two possible reasons and two ways that we can solve this. This is our catalog request data source that we've been using earlier. And let me show you a particular type of data entry error in Excel that then causes a problem for us in Microsoft Word. If I type the ZIP Code that is in cell I2, which is 03249, and simply enter it, automatically Excel removes that zero, which would make no sense if this was a value. It's called a leading zero, it's a zero that appears to the left of the numbers before the decimal point and there's also trailing zeros. If I entered a number like 450.5600 the last two zeros will be removed. And that's because they don't change the value at all. The problem, of…

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