See inline:

>Cetin:
>
>Thanks.
>
>SIM fyi is our software - it was in the source code stands for Simplified Idea Management.
>
>We used the header source since it allows the WORD source document to be open when we do a merge and avoids errors if the customer is editing the source mail merge document and then they do a merge against it. It also allows use to have a completely empty data header and attach data at the merge instance.


Without header you can still provide mergefields either programmatically or manually. You could create and save a template or create one with mergefields you want.


>
>A TAB delimited file sounds fine and I can work on linking that in - that is a clean approach and I want to avoid ODBC issues as well! I can do a similar trick and create a blank tab delimited file that links in with the document. By the way do you know how many columns or fields we can link in this way? The table seemed to be limited to around 19 as I remember.

I'm not aware of such a limit.


>
>Will keep the old approach for the existing version as creating a table in WORD automatically works very well. Just again WORD doesn't know when editing the source merge letter that it is a mail merge letter. It processes the merge letter correctly, just doesn't bring up the ability to add merge fields.
>
>Jim

I don't even remember original context of this thread:) If that version is old enough you might check my MailMerge class in downloads.

Cetin