Have you tried going into the control panel and regiional options and date
and making sure that the default date setting is dd-mm-yy?

Usually you can solve these things if you use the DDE connection method - in
Word 2002/3 check Tools|Options|General|"Confirm conversion at open", go
through the connection process again, and select the DDE option when
offered.

Otherwise, try using Alt-F9 in Word to view the raw fields and change, e.g.

{ MERGEFIELD mydate }

to

{ MERGEFIELD mydate \@"DD//MM/YYYY" }

and

{ MERGEFIELD mynumber }

to something like

{ MERGEFIELD mynumber \#0 }

There is more in Graham Mayor's article at

http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm

If you can't get the month and date to appear in the right order using
\@"DD/M/YYYY", it is probably because of a problem in the OLEDB provider
that Word is probably using to get the data. The DDE approach should solve
that, but at one point Microsoft offered a fix - you would have to contact
their Customer Support Services for more info. on that.

Peter Jamieson