Paul, just to let you know that my project turned out to be a success; thanks so much for your help.

One minor thing that still needs tweaking though is my zip code field. The merge process looked at my zipcode values in excel and actually subtracted the four digit from the five digit portion and output the difference. For instance, a nine-digit zipcode of 37744-0781 that was listed in the excel data source resulted in a zipcode of 36963 being printed on the letters. (We didn't realize this error until after all 898 letters were printed. Since we had to put a label on the outside of the envelopes for mailing anyway, this zipcode error was a mute point so we let it go anyway...). Any idea how I can prevent this in the future?