Add mail merge variable

I have developed an Excel spread sheet with a mail merge add-on. It tracks yearly church contributions and then provides a contributions summary for tax purposes that are sent out in January. The summary letter has the sentence “Your total contributions for the year 2014 is”

 I wish to make this year to automatically update to the next year i.e. Last year’s letter said 2013. I had a popup that reminded them to change the year in the letter before running the mail merge. One person forgot and caused all kinds of problems for someone preparing the tax form.

In other words, I need a variable that always shows the preceding year date in the mail merge letter

Answer
Answer
Click in the field and press Shift+F9. This assumes that you inserted the field correctly using Ctrl+F9 to insert the field brace pairs.
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Answer
Answer

Simple - use a formula field coded as:

{QUOTE{={DATE \@ YYYY}-1}}

Note: The field brace pairs (i.e. '{ }') for the above example are created in the document itself, via Ctrl-F9 (Cmd-F9 on a Mac); you can't simply type them or copy & paste them from this message. Nor is it practicable to add them via any of the standard Word dialogues.

Cheers
Paul Edstein
(Fmr MS MVP - Word)

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Last updated April 14, 2025 Views 611 Applies to: