Microsoft Word Mail Merge Currency Formatting

When using data from Excel for a mail merge in Word, the dollar sign may not be shown for currency formatted columns in the excel data.  To fix this issue, connect to the excel file using a "MS Excel Worksheets via DDE (*.xls)" connection.

In the select recipients step of the mail merge wizard, browse to and select your excel data file. 

In the Confirm Data Source dialog box, select "MS Excel Worksheets via DDE (*.xls)" and click OK.  If that option is not in the list, check the box to Show all and it should appear.

With the DDE connection type, the formatting of the excel spreadsheet is preserved, so currency will appear correctly rather than as plain numbers.