Now I realize that this isn't necessarily what the reporting in Access was designed for, but in order to make it more user friendly, I have been asked to design a letter through report rather than to use the mail merge function in Word, which upon printing will update that it has been printed and the date that it was printed. I have the update query ready, I have the reports ready. I have the macro ready. Everything is good to go except for one thing.

Is there any way to add punctuation to a field to be placed directly following text?

ie - Dear [First_Name]: (rather than printing "Dear Bob :" print "Dear Bob:")

I just don't want this to look unprofessional, but currently, I know of no way to add punctuation to the salutation.

I take it the issue is with the space between the data field and the punctuation?

Try: "Dear " & trim(mydatafieldname) & ":"

If this is wrong, you need to give us a lot more information.

have you looked at the super easy word function - check samples