What has changed in Word 2002 is that the default method for connecting to
Access data has changed from DDE to OLEDB. With DDE, you generally get data
that is much closer to what you see in Access, but Word has to run Access to
do it. With OLEDB (ad the other connection method, ODBC), you generally get
the "underlying" data, and OLEDB generally ignores any format/layout
information you have specified in Access.

Typically, when you have blank dates in Access, you will soemthing like
"12:00:00 AM" or some such in Word if you connect using OLEDB.

You can revert to the DDE connection type by checking  Word
Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversion at open" then going through the
process to connect to your data source again, and choosing the DDE option
when it is offered. You may be able to deal with the problem using

{ IF "{ MERGEFIELD mydate }" = "12:00:00 AM" "" "{ MERGEFIELD mydate }" }

(Make sure you compare with the actual value that Access returns - what I've
typed may not be correct, and use ctrl-F9 to insert each pair of {} )

Just out of interest, how did you do that? Did you use the format()
function, and did you work directly with the SQL, or in the Query Design
grid?

--
Peter Jamieson - Word MVP
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org/

the date field will not come over empty even though there is no data in it.
I tried taking it into Excel and merging from there.  That was better.
However, of the five date fields that I'm using in the merge, two of them
still had data in the empty fields.  It does not show up in either Access or
in Excel, but appears when it is merged into Word.

force the format in the Access query, but that did not help at all.  This
worked fine in Word 97.  It appears to be something to do with Word 2002,
but I can't figure out what.