Excel data source to Word mail merge

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I am trying to use Excel 2010 as a data source for a Word 2010 mail merge. I am pulling several text fields and date fields. One of the text fields (a city name) always comes out as 12:00:00 AM. One of the text fields always shows as 0. Other text fields work correctly. The fields in Excel are formatted as General or text, I have tried both. The two date fields are pulled with { MERGEFIELD "Start_Date" \@ "MMMM d, yyyy"} but show up as the date number line 41518.
I very much appreciate your help.

 

[snipescc]

I am trying to use Excel 2010 as a data source for a Word 2010 mail merge. I am pulling several text fields and date fields. One of the text fields (a city name) always comes out as 12:00:00 AM. One of the text fields always shows as 0. Other text fields work correctly. The fields in Excel are formatted as General or text, I have tried both. The two date fields are pulled with { MERGEFIELD "Start_Date" \@ "MMMM d, yyyy"} but show up as the date number line 41518.
I very much appreciate your help.

I found the problem. The first line of the Excel data was headings, the second line had some summary counts in come fields, formatted as numbers. The mail merge looked at this line to determine the data type for the column and so it was supplying the wrong data type in meta data to Word. When I made this line the correct data type, word picked up the data correctly. I will definde a named range of just the real data and got the correct formats.