Altering the format of the date field when merging from MS Access

When I merge a date field from MS Access into MS Word I get the American format (mm/dd/yy). This is despite the fact that the field in the database table and the database query is expressed in a different format. I have tried changing the format in MS Access and MS Word but to no avail. I'm a fairly experienced computer user and cannot understand what I am doing worng as one would have thought the soulution would be fairly straight forward.

Tom Challinor wrote:

When I merge a date field from MS Access into MS Word I get the American format (mm/dd/yy). This is despite the fact that the field in the database table and the database query is expressed in a different format. I have tried changing the format in MS Access and MS Word but to no avail. I'm a fairly experienced computer user and cannot understand what I am doing worng as one would have thought the soulution would be fairly straight forward.

First, don't expect the format to be the same as the one you use in
Access. The format is more likely to come from the settings in COntrol
Panel|Regional Options. However, it depends on the version of Word and
how you are making the connection to Access.

Second, you may be able to solve the problem by adding a "date format
switch" to the merge field in Word.

e.g. if you want DD/MM/YYYY format instead of MM/DD/YYYY format, try
modifying a field such as

{ MERGEFIELD mydate }

to

{ MERGEFIELD mydate \@"DD/MM/YYYY" }

Unfortunately, that will not always work in recent versions of Word
(2002/2003) because of an error in the OLEDB provider that is used by
default to get the data from Access. If you find that the day and month
are switched around even when you use a date format switch, consider
a. ensuring you have insalled the latest Word/Office service pack. I
believe this problem may have been fixed. If not, you should be able to
contact Microsoft support to get a patch to solve this problem (i.e. you
may not be able to download it from their web site).
b. changing the way you connect to Access. If you check
Tools|Options|General|"COnfirm conversion at open", then go through the
connection process again, you should be asked what method to use. Try
either DDE (which is what older versions of WOrd used by default, and
which requires you to have Access), or ODBC
c. (if absolutely necessary) writing a query in Access that formats
the date in exactly the format you want, and use that as the data source.

Peter Jamieson