While verifying the validity of a mail merge, one of my coworkers ran into the issue of extracting a currency value from a spreadsheet and correctly formatting it in Microsoft Word. The issue stemmed from using this numeric picture field switch which is suggested by Microsoft:
\# $#,###.00
If you have a speadsheet full of large numbers, the above code will probably work. On the other hand, if you have a one or two digit number, a few spaces will exist between the dollar sign and the number. Perhaps this is desirable to people at Microsoft, but in many other places, this isn’t what people want. Instead, after doing a little research and trial runs, I found that this numeric picture field switch will display currency with the leading spaces for small numbers:
\# $,0.00
