editing the grid layout on postslider.php to include custom data

* I have posted this question on a previous post so appologies for the duplication but I am worried that as its on old post – it might not be seen.

Hi, I have used the Advanced Custom Fields plugin and am ytrying to load some of this info into the blog grid – I have successfully got the modifications into the child theme but no matter where I place the code for the custom field in the postslider.php file, it loads it at the very top of the page – above all the content – when there are more than 1, it loads several above all the content – can I get this to load into the grid?
my code looks similar to this:

$output .= !empty($excerpt) ? “<div class=’slide-entry-excerpt entry-content’ $markup>”.$excerpt.”</div>” : “”;
$output .= the_field(‘excerpt’); //* note – this is the line I have added!!
$output .= “</div>”;
$output .= ‘<footer class=”entry-footer”>’;

Its odd – if I add some basic html to this example <div>this is a test</div>, I can get this to appear whereever I want. As soon as I am trying to load custom data from Advanced custom fields, it ignores where I put it in the template and just adds it to the top of the page. I even tried <div>this is a test <my custom content></div> this loaded the ‘this is a test’ text where I wanted it to go but threw the advanced custom fields data to the top of the page.

any ideas?

thanks!