I am working on what should be an extremely simple problem, but which is driving me to a murderous rage.
I have a very simple spreadsheet: (See below)
List of names in first column + ~20 columns, each representing an event
Each cell is filled with a date when an individual attends an event. Each column has been formatted as numbers.
However... as shown, if I don't know the exact date of attendance, I insert placeholder text, like an X, o, or "skip"
Sometimes if there are two dates, I enter them as text with a semicolon.
I need to create a very simple mail merge document, showing a single individual's attendance. All I need is for the dates to show up in the mail merge. And when I do this on a Mac using Excel for Mac 2011, it works perfectly. (See below.)
HOWEVER, for some unfathomable reason, when I do it on a PC running MS Office 2010, this is the result I get:
A bewilderingly random mishmash of dates, times, serial numbers, and placeholders...
After spending hours in the help forums, I have thus far:
- played around with the field coding (i.e. adding \@ "MM/dd/yyyy")
- tried removing all placeholders from the column and assuring only dates appear in the column
- tried merging using DDS
- added a first row to the database that is formatted correctly with no blanks or placeholders
Can anyone help me figure out what on earth I am missing here?