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?

Hi Tracy,

Once the mailmerge main document is closed, the Excel file should be too, and released for others to use.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks for the response. The problem we are running into is people are not closing their word document for hours on end and since it could be one of a hundred people most of the time the excel file is not accessable for up to a day.

So we are looking for a work around :-)

Hi Tracy,

That's really a management issue. However, one possibility would be to drive the process through a macro that sits in a different document (ie your users never open the mailmerge main document directly). The macro could open the mailmerge main document, execute the merge, then immediately close the mailmerge main document. Whether that would be viable depends on your organisation's attitudes to macros and whether you can so arrange things that your users no longer have direct access to the mailmerge main document. Restricting access won't be viable if they need to edit that document.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]