Mail merge ('09) is giving spurious results

Question

I am trying to do what should have been a fairly simple mail merge function, but it is producing weird results.  I am doing date calculations in Numbers, and using that for producing a document with different date elements (all are in the spreadsheet).  The formulas are working correctly, and the cells contain the correct information, but when I do the mail merge, Pages picks up data from different cells.  I can even change the target cells, and it still picks up the same data.
Here is a portion of the Numbers data.
The first entry (B2) is entered as a date.  The rest are all calculated using date functions.  The pattern is: Date, Month Name, Day Date.  Then repeat for the next day, etc.
And, here is what it produced, with the target cell name preceding the merged data.  The text in blue worked correctly.  Once I created a text box, and put merge fields inside it, though, it started falling apart.  As you can see, the data did not match the cell data associated with the column name.  I then tried using the same data outside of the text box, and it was again spurious.  It seems that using a text box messes it up.  What I am using this on is very graphically oriented, and I hate to think of the challenge of not using text boxes and lining up graphic elements with underlying text… ugh….
After spending a full day on this simple project, I gave up and went to Word.  I exported my Numbers data as an Excel spreadsheet, and it merged beautifully on a test run.  So, I reformatted all my documents (with a lot of images, which is part of why I wanted to use Pages). After spending another day getting it laid out in Word, I did the final merge.  Success!  It looked beautiful.  I cut the documents to the size I needed, only to find out it had resized them!  Back to Pages, which I prefer.  I can't get past the spurious results.  I've tried reloading Pages and the documents, but it doesn't work.  I have a number of templates in Pages that I need to use for this function, and I hate to think of finding a different program and redoing all of them.
I am using iWork 09.  My Pages is version 4.3, and my OS is 10.7.5. 
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Oh, one other quirky thing happened.  In the text box I entered "mon1" for the starting date.  When I highlighted it, and added it as a Merge Field, it immediately changed the text to "mo1n".  I tried to correct it, but it changed it every time.  I have had that happen a number of times with other merge fields.  The "n" shows up after the date in the merged document, suggesting that the Merge Field was "mo1".  However, in my list of Merge Fields, it shows as "mon1".