If you actually merge the letter to a document, it will save what you typed.
You are doing what I do, merging to a screen preview which can be printed.
This still has live fields.

What I've done is add two buttons to my merge toolbar to lock and unlock
fields. These trigger the following two macros:

Sub FieldsLockAllStory()
' All Story Field Locker
' Written by Charles Kyle Kenyon 9 December 2004
' repaired with help from Jezebel 10 December 2004
Dim oStory As Range
On Error Resume Next
For Each oStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
Do
oStory.Fields.Locked = True
Set oStory = oStory.Next
Loop Until oStory Is Nothing
Next
End Sub
Sub FieldsUnLockAllStory()
' All Story Field Unlocker
' Written by Charles Kyle Kenyon 9 December 2004
' repaired with help from Jezebel 10 December 2004
Dim oStory As Range
On Error Resume Next
For Each oStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
Do
oStory.Fields.Locked = False
Set oStory = oStory.Next
Loop Until oStory Is Nothing
Next
End Sub

I use a modified version of the padlock button from the forms toolbar for
these (changed color on both and open lock on the one to unlock).

Note if you have a Page X of Y in your header/footer, you'll want to
manually unlock that field or it will be wrong.

Otherwise, you can print as a pdf file.

--

Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
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"Raven" wrote in message
...
I have Word 2003, as we just migrated to WinXP. I have a form letter with
merge fields as a template. When I try to use the mail merge wizard and
edit
to add a new recipient and save the letter, it looks ok. If I then close
the
letter after I've "saved as" and look at it again, the personalized info
is
gone, and they all look like the first one I typed. The other secretary
said
to edit the data source directly, but it's doing the same thing. What is
this doing? I don't have time to re-write letters again and again because
it
won't save what I just bloody typed!