I am fed up with the two standards of writing a date. When will we people in the world start thinking the world as a global village? For last several years I am using Mail Merge function to create TDS certificates. This year when I used the latest version of office, I noticed that when I merge a date field from excel to word, it automatically changes from dd/mm/yy to mm/dd/yy format. I have already changed the country setting to UK.
(Start - Settings - Control Panel - Regional Options - General and Date Tab)
I tried a lot of options like Tools - options, Insert - date, Format –field. But I could not change the merged field format from mm/dd/yy to dd/mm/yy. Finally here is how I managed it.
1) Right click on the field and choose "Edit Fields..."
2) Click on Field Codes
3) You will see the line something like this: MERGEFIELD Issue_Date You have to add the date format like this: \@ "dd/MM/yyyy"

I have just tested it using Word 2000 and it seems that only Word 2002 is affected by this feature. Actually Word 2002 has much more features. But sometimes less is better!

I tried the formula mentioned above and it turned out to be bug in the latest version of office! It changed the Month where the date was more than 12. It means it changed 3/31/04 to 31/3/04 but did not changed 3/8/04 to 8/3/04.
I had to change the dates format to text. (Copy date column - From Data - Text to column - Text format)