How to Do a Mail Merge in Word on Mac

When it comes to formatting numbers and dates in Excel before performing a mail merge with Microsoft Word, there are some essential things to keep in mind. A key thing to remember is that both '0' and '#' act as placeholders for digits, but '0' will force leading or trailing zeros to appear.

Formatting options such as font, size, and color do not make the trip from Excel into a Word Mail Merge document. However, formatting numbers and dates as text has an advantage - it ensures that text is transported from Excel into a Word Mail Merge document unmolested. In Excel 2016, these 'numbers' can be used in all formulas except aggregate functions such as SUM and AVERAGE.

In older versions of Excel, these 'numbers' could not be used in calculations. To avoid confusion, it's a good idea to format the cells containing these formulas in a different style, say italic or some unusual color to remind you that these numbers are simply text.

The TEXT function in Excel enables you to convert a number or date into its equivalent text formatted exactly the way you desire. For example, the formulas TEXT(B3, '$#,#0.00') and TEXT(C5, 'M/dd/yy') convert number and date data into textual data (in this case, '$12,345.67' and '12/01/10').

One of the downsides is that you need to know certain formatting codes. To avoid the problem altogether, you can insert a column with a formula in the Excel worksheet that converts the Excel numbers or dates into a text format that is exactly the same as what you would want to appear in your Mail Merge document.

For example, a sales result in Excel appears as 100 but in Word it suddenly becomes 99.99999999996! Fortunately, there are three different ways to get Mail Merge numbers to appear the way they should. One of the perennial annoyances of Mail Merge is its inability to format numbers from an Excel spreadsheet correctly.

Unfortunately, mastering all of its idiosyncrasies can give you countless headaches. However, once you learn how to use it, you can save countless hours of work. The Mail Merge feature of Microsoft Word is one of my favorite parts of the program - it's extremely powerful for creating labels and customized letters, emails, or reports.

How to do a mail merge in word on mac