Formating Mail Merge fields in Word

we recently created a mail merge interface with Ms word and our application using .net. The problem with doing the mail merge is it removes all the formating from the data that is getting merged. So you need to manually apply all the formating to these codes.

I needed to convert my values to dollarformat i pressed alt f9 which shows all the merge codes in your document and then add the following code \# $#,###.00

{MERGEFIELD Balance_Due \# $#,###.00 \* MERGEFORMAT}