News

When 9.5 turns into 9.48999999999999!
Has Microsoft finally fixed the number format problem in Microsoft Word’s Mail Merge feature? Some glimmers of hope — But no.

Platform: Windows & Mac
Apps: Word & Excel
Version: Microsoft 365 (nee Office 365), June 2021
Date: June 8, 2021, Updated: June 21, 2021

I was fooled! I thought that Microsoft had finally fixed that annoying number formatting problem in Mail Merge. Some early tests with the latest version of Microsoft 365 indicated that this was so. But I celebrated too soon. It turns out that the number formatting works correctly, but only in very special circumstances.

Here is what happened: I was doing some tests to see if there had been any improvement in the way Mail Merge worked. I set up an Excel workbook with columns of numbers. In each row of the numbers, I used a different number format: No decimal places in one row, then one decimal place, then two, then the Currency format, etc. Well, guess what happened? When I brought these numbers into a Word document using Mail Merge, the formats were perfect! Could it be? Had Microsoft finally fixed the number formatting problem? It seemed so, and I was ecstatic! Sort of. I quickly put together a blog post and a YouTube video to spread the good news.

But then the bad news. A few days later, I did a real-world test. After all, nobody puts a different number format on each row of a column. In this new test, I did what everybody does: the same format for each row.

And once again, you can guess what happened. In the Word document, the formats were terrible. Again, the 16 decimal places returned. What was going on?

Did Microsoft change the program again? I returned to me first test with the different format, and it still worked. After a few hours of more testing, I determined that there is some strange bug in Word 2019. If one or two of the numbers in a column have a different format from the others, the number formatting works fine in Mail Merge. Huh?

From what little I know of programming, I can’t imagine how this could happen. Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe Word does have the capability to handle number formatting correctly, but there’s a slight bug in the code. And maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will spot it and fix it.

Then, we can really celebrate. Until then, we have to use the three techniques I mentioned in another post (https://sit.cxf.mybluehost.me/3-ways-to-fix-mail-merge-number-formatting-in-microsoft-word/).

Mail Merge is an awesome tool, in fact, it’s my favorite part of Microsoft Word. If you use it right, it can save you countless hours of tedious work. Let’s hope Microsoft fixes this number formatting problem, and that they do it soon.

— Rich Malloy, Tech Help Today