Mail Merge Time (suddenly) displaying as decimals again

A wonderful explanation Paul in the difference in OLE DB and DDE, thank you for the time.

I was excited to apply and try your suggested code. Sadly, it continued to hang, interrupted within a few minutes with a message "MergeData.xlsx" (the source document) being locked for editing.
Selecting {READ ONLY} resulted in Word message "Word could not re-establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Excel to complete the current task.", then followed by a request to find the data source despite the path noted for it in the message being accurate. When you close the message (declining the options) word advises with a message that the file cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents. (Unspecified error Location: Part: /word/settings.xml, Line: 2, Column: 2934). Upon pressing OK, Word displays "Word found unreadble content in DR-RPL7.docx". Pressing No to recover the contents leads to a VBA error kmessage "Word could not re-establish a DDE connection to complete the current task", pointing to the line we just edited.

There are at this point two instances of the data source open in Excel, a normal one and a read only one.

This is painful.

By the way ... if I manually open the main mail merge document, everything works fine.

Jenn

Cross posted: http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthr...10#post3216910