I am working on standard letters in Word with mail merge fields. The letters are copied by users for their specific project and renamed. The data for the mail merge fields is located in an Excel file which is accessed across a network. We have noticed that when people link the Excel file to their specific letter, the excel file cannot be accessed by anyone else - not even in read only mode. Is there a way to allow people to:

1. link the excel file to their word file without the excel file not allowing others to access (ie multiple access to the excel file)? Or
2. set up a macro that automatically breaks the link to the excel file when the word file is closed?