The text file example provided IS the instruction. Each record contains three
filenames. For example, the first record:

c:\templatedir\document1.doc,c:\custdir\data.txt,c :\custdir\output1.rtf

says merge [data.txt] with [document1.doc] and write [output1.rtf]

Steve



"Graham Mayor" wrote:

What 'instructions' do you propose adding to the text file that would
trigger the need to re-merge? Is this text file the data file?
A word merge will write all its output to a single file - you could split
that file later into separate documents, but it would always start as a
single file. Whether what you propose is doable or not depends on exactly
what it is you are proposing and you have provided insufficient information
about the project to form an opinion.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org



Steve wrote:
This is an interesting assignment:

I need to feed information to Word 2000 telling it to merge given
files with given data, producing given output. I figure I would
append instructions to a text file, then have a Word macro
periodically look at the text file, and, if instructions were found,
perform a merge. The text file would look something like this:

c:\templatedir\document1.doc,c:\custdir\data.txt,c :\custdir\output1.rtf
c:\templatedir\document2.doc,c:\custdir\data.txt,c :\custdir\output2.rtf

So, the macro would merge document1.doc with data.txt and write
output1.rtf, and continue to the next record, etc.

I'm not a VB programmer, does this look doable?