Hi everyone

I have an Excel sheet which contains a series of dates.  I have set their
format to "d MMMM yyyy".  One of them is taken into Word 2003 as a field
named LastPayment.  I want to compare this with a specific date (24
September 2005) and, depending upon whether the result indicated the past or
future, either "was" or "is" should be returned.

I have tried the following, but it doesn't work correctly:

{ IF { MERGEFIELD LastPayment \@ "d MMMM yyyy" } > "24 September 2005" "is"
"was" }

It works OK if the day is after 24 (i.e. "28 February 2005" returns "is",
whilst "20 December 2005" returns "was") but it doesn't examine the whole
date for the comparison.

I tried forcing 24 September 2005 to this format by adding a switch:

{ IF { MERGEFIELD LastPayment \@ "d MMMM yyyy" } > "24 September 2005 \@ d
MMMM yyyy" "is" "was" }

but this didn't make any difference, nor did it result in an error.  I don't
even know if the application of a switch in this way is logical or
appropriate.

How do I change this to make the comparison work correctly?

Thanks for your time.

Tosca