Hi Neil,

If the field types in the Access table are set to Text (which they would
have to be to accept such data), you should not have any problem merging to
Word.  There should be not formatting switches required.

What result are you getting when you execute the merge?

Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested.  Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

Unfortunately, as you have discovered there are no switches that will help.
Which either means you  use VBA in Word or...

...you do it via a bunch of queries.

OK, so having to create queries just for this purpose is a pain, but it's
probably less of a pain than many of the other possible approaches. I
suspect the problem is that some people (including me) tend to be more
comfortable with writing queries directly in SQL, whereas others are more
comfortable with the tabular Access Query design pane. You also have to be
able to work out what character string functions you need - even the query
design pane isn't going to help you there.

If I'm creating a query in Access based on an existing table, what I
generally do is
a. work out what Access is actually storing and what combination of
functions I need to extract/transform the data
b. create a new query using the query design pane, including whatever
tables I need. This saves me having to get the various SQL Joins and
Jet-specific SQL syntax right
c. right-click in the query design pane title-bar (or top area) and select
SQL view. I then get to work directly with the SQL
d. toggle between SQL view, design view, and datasheet (results) view as
required. I use the right-click approach but maybe Access people know useful
keyboard shortcuts.

As far as the SQL is concerned,
a. you can use most of the VBA character, numeric and date manipulation
functions in expressions. Some may cause problems such as replace. You can
even use "user-defined" functions (i.e. written in Access VBA) but then you
have to connect to your data source from Word using DDE.
b. you can, and should, give your new columns names using AS `columnname`

e.g. The query Access (2000) sets up here when I create a new query based on
my xyz table is

SELECT *
FROM xyz
WITH OWNERACCESS OPTION;

Ignoring the WITH OWNERACCESS OPTION for the moment, if I want for example
to extract the first three characters of column abc, all I need do is modify
the query to

SELECT left(abc,3) AS `abc3`, *
FROM xyz

In the examples you give, you might find the following functions do the
trick, assuming the underlying fields are always actually text fields and
the formats are always precisely as you describe here:

CBCID        #LL-##            3NF-12

left(cbcid,3) + '-' + mid(cbcid,4) AS `mycbcid`

DHID         LLL-####          DHP-1234

left(dhid,3) + '-' + mid(dhid,4) AS `mydhid`

ISBN         #-#####-###-C     1-23456-789-X or
                                               1-23456-789-1

left(isbn,1) + '-' + mid(isbn,2,5) + '-' + mid(isbn,7,3) + '-' + mid(isbn,9)
AS `myisbn`

In fact you should be able to name the new fields `cbcid`, `dhid` and `isbn`
but I generally prefer to leave the original data as is.

Does that help? If not, can you indicate where you're getting stuck? Or is
it basically that you don't want to create Access queries to do this?

--
Peter Jamieson
MS Word MVP