[SJMac]

Hello,

I'm an app programmer looking at a Word and Access Mail Merge issue - lost
and confused!

I've been asked to look at an Access DB application that has a custom input
form with a big table behind it. Related to that are a collection of Word
templates for form letters with lots of Merge Fields in.

The templates were originally created and used with Word 2000, but the
current environment is Office XP/Word 2002. I've been told that there used to
be a button in the toolbar called "Merge" that prompted the user to type in a
case number to identify the DB row to merge, but that is missing without
trace right now.

When I open the Word templates I get warnings that some SQL is about to be
executed - that's OK, but I can't find that SQL in the VBA editor, or any of
the document properties for the templates. Where should I be looking? I'd
like to change the SQL, or delete it -- how can I do that?

No data is inserted in to the templates after I open them. Why is SQL being
executed for the template? Surely the data normally needs to be retrieved for
the actual documents, or when I do the merge?

Additionally, the SQL described in the warning is a search for a particular
row from Access. If I click the "Merge to new document" button while editing
the template, then every entry in the table is merged, so what was the point
of the SQL?

When I create a new document based on a template, there does not appear to
be any data source defined, and the Merge toolbar is hidden, so I need to do
a few clicks to get that on the screen -- how can I keep that on the screen
by default?

My goal is to allow the user to create a form letter based on a single entry
in the DB with as few clicks as possible. I think that I need to start by
getting some good defaults in the template (like the correct data source),
carrying that default over to the docs created from the template, and also
having the Merge toolbar visible to the user when they are looking at a Merge
document.

Any clues will be gratefully recieved ...

Steven