>Can anyone tell me the syntax I need to make a merged document come up as read only? I don't want to make the original document read only, just the newly created merged one.

I'm not sure you can do that unless you save it, close it and reopen it as read-only. However, Word's definition of "read-only" isn't terribly meaningful anyway. It means that you can't resave to the same file. It doesn't prevent editing and it doesn't prevent Save As.

Tamar