Word Mail Merge Date Format

I'm using Word 2002 SP2.

Have had some real problems over the last week trying to get Word's
mail merge to correctly (and consistently) interpret date values.

I tried feeding in all sorts of date formats - this didn't work.

I tried forcing Word to interpret my date as a string - this didn't
work either.

I was about to resort to injecting my date as three separate fields (a
real sledgehammer to crack a nut - that's how desperate I was).

But then I tried enclosing my date in '#' characters - and it worked -
I recall date literals being encoded like this in MS Access.

E.g. the dates in my text file were thus:

#12 december 2002#

I can then us the /@ "dd MMM yyyy" type merge field switches to format
the date as I wish in Word.

Couldn't find this answer anywhere on the net - so thought I'd post it
here in case it helps others. I have no idea whether this works on
other versions of Word or indeed whether the same problem occurs.

It's just so confusing and there is no clear documentation for this.
Why o why does the world use software that is so badly documented!!

BTW I should point out - my data resides in a unicode text file (tab
delimited) but my 'pre-processing' takes this text file and opens it
up and saves it out to an excel document - which is used as input to
the mail merge process. I couldn't get Word to accept my text file
directly (perhaps this was part of the original problem - i.e.
translating the text file into Excel - to be honest I don't really
care [I've been ground down by the problem as you see!] - it works now
anyway - yahoo!).

Mark.
UK.