Excel date formatting problems

[Bearworld1]

Merging word doc into an excel database, when i choose recipients, excel is changing date format from 23rd May 2006 to the US way of 05/23/2006. Ive tried all the usual things but its driving me mad. Anyone help?

[Catso]

Does your Word document have the country set to US (sometimes Word gets hung up on US!)?

Or, select all the Excel cells and format them with the date format you want.

[Bearworld1]

thanks for the answer Catso. I've already tried all of those things, only have the UK language pack installed and all the date cells in excel are formatted to UK long date format. Its when you bring up the mail merge recipients window that it reformats them all to the short USA format and there is no option at that poin to change them. If I had any hair it would have been pulled out in the last few days!

[Catso]

Do you mean you're mail-merging an Excel db into a Word document? Not importing a Word doc into Excel (as your question seems to say, to me)?

Whether you have language packs installed or not makes no difference to Word's ability to support/select UK or US for a doc. What does your Word doc show if you do Tools, Language, Show Language.