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Mail Merge: How to retain negative time format

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795 views 3 replies 2 participants last post by  Warricktan 
#1 ·
Hi There,
Really need some advice here after cracking my head and searching for a long time.

I have a negative time displayed in my excel sheet (e.g -01:22 mm:ss) which I would like to retain the format when I do a mail merge on MS word. However, the time gets converted to 01:22 (becomes positive).

I have tried to add the '-' sign at the front using an If .... Else... statement when the value is Less Than '0'. Both methods do not work out.

Thank you.
 
#2 ·
By default, Word 2002 & later use the OLE DB provider to get merge data from an Excel workbook. Because the OLE DB provider is designed to return data in a way that is compatible with Access and other relational database packages, it requires a specific data type for each field, and every value in that field must have only that data type. In Excel, however, cells in a column (field) can have different data types. When the OLE DB provider gets data from an Excel column with mixed data types, it has to determine the data type for each column. The first 8 records are used for that (the 8 can be changed in the Windows Registry, but it’s not advisable to do so). Records that don’t conform to the determined data type are liable to not be handled correctly. To complicate matters, there are two text data types: "text" (up to 255 characters) and "memo" (can be longer than that).

Some common mailmerge issues arising out of this include:
• Numbers but not text or dates being output for some records; and
• Text data being truncated at 255 characters.

In your case, the issue is most likely because the OLE DB provider 'sees' the first few records as valid time values, so interprets the entire column as displaying times. Workarounds you could use include:
• Inserting a dummy first record containing a negative time value; or
• Reordering the data so the first record has content with a negative time value.
 
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