>I'm doing something similar, but with a slightly different approach. I have buttons (because the user likes buttons - I'd rather have a combo) which insert delimited text at the .selstart position in the editbox. But I'm not inserting anything merge-ready; I'm inserting English names of insertables, delimited by curly braces... so I'd have
>
>Your invoice {invoice number} has been proccesed on {today's date}.
>
>Then it's a simple matter to match the English names with actual expressions - they are somewhere in a table or a cursor. Once I replace the insertables' names with actual insertables, I save both texts into separate memos, so I always have the editable text, and the usable text.
>
>You can imagine how pleased the users are that they don't have to read through any heavy syntax, specially when my insertables aren't just values, they're HTML links with a full line of tags.

Drangon,

Thanks for the reply!

Inserting English names is a great idea and I'll definitely adopt that. If I can make my users happy, I am happy. Of course, no one pleases everyone.