Mail Merge 3 digit place holders 000, 001, etc

**staff23** · 04-25-2015, 10:18 PM

Hello,

I'm trying to create lottery tickets for a fund raiser using mail merge. I've searched on here and saw some help with other similar but not exact request. Hopefully you can help.

I need to have the numbers 000-999 for a pick 3 lottery where each number 0-9 could be drawn 3 times. Obviously if you've seen a pick three lottery you know the winner could be 0,0,0. I can get the mail merge to work from 100-999 but while the custom format in excel shows three digits (000) in the bar it shows just a 0, or a 1 for 001. How can I format Mail merge to pick up those three digits needed?

Thank you

**FDibbins** · 04-26-2015, 12:50 AM

Hi, welcome to the forum

You posted this in the Word forum, but you mention excel?

I did this in excel, using Custom Formatting 000-000-000, and then just entered 1..2..3..4 etc

	A
1	000 000 001
2	000 000 002
3	000 000 003
4	000 000 004
5	000 000 005
6	000 000 006
7	000 000 007
8	000 000 008
9	000 000 009
10	000 000 010
11	011 111 111

Maybe this is what you wanted?

**staff23** · 04-26-2015, 07:38 AM

Hi Thanks, yes I got it to work in excel using the custom formatting. I wanted to merge it into word and print "tickets" I was going to use the avery labels 5164 template but just print them on paper and cut them out

**macropod** · 06-07-2015, 04:09 AM

You could do this entirely in Word, without the need for mailmerge. All you need do is insert a SEQ field onto each label, with a custom number formatting switch. Such a SEQ field might be coded as:
{SEQ Ticket \# "000' '000' '000"}
where the field braces (i.e. { }) are created in the document via Ctrl-F9. Simply create one such field on the first label, then copy it to all other labels on the page. Next, copy & paste the entire page to create as many as you need. Finally, press Ctrl-A, F9 to update the numbering.