>Hi Diana,
>
>Thanks for your helpful reply and apologies for the delay in thanking you...I have been away on vacation.
>Your suggestion works fine but I am using the expot command to output data to Excel 5 worksheet which Word uses as a data source for the merge document. Can I output data in another way (in another format I mean) so as to avoid the user having excel starting up whenever the merge document is opened?
>Grateful for any ideas you might have
>
>Regards,
>
>
>Bob

Sure, Word can use a fox table as a data source.