Hi BluRay,

Mergefields a simply a kind of Word field. Another kind of field is a formfield. Then there are date fields, calculation (formula) fields and many others.

The two PDFs look to me to be different representations of the same fields. Pressing Alt-F9 toggles between the two displays.

If you save a mailmerge main document (which is what your PDFs represent), the mergefield information will be preserved. When you execute a merge to a new document, the new document has the merged data instead of the mergefields. The mailmerge main document is unaffected by this and you can save the new document if you want. Don't give it the same name as the mailmerge main document, or you risk losing the latter.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]