MERGE FROM EXCEL INTO A WORD DOCUMENT-FORMATTING PROBLEM

I'm using an Excel spreadsheet for data for a Word main document. I'm having trouble with numbers; if they are automatically formatted with the dollar sign and two decimal places, i.e., $1,200.00, the dollar sign, period and zeros at the end do not merge into my Word document when I merge them, just the number (1200) comes in. The only way it will work if I manually type them in and have the cell formatted to text. Why is this happening? And is there anyway to get it work? thanks