Mail Merge and Cross References (Word 2003)

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I have a client how has a legal agreement with many cross references. This legal agreement is set up as a mail merge document. After merging the information to a new document, all the cross reference fields are stripped. Is this normal? I have searched everywhere and cannot find any information on whether this is a bug or working as designed… thanx for your input…

Oh by the way… if this is ‘as designed’, any suggestions on how to retain the cross-references… at this point, I’m thinking of not using mail merge but, instead, hyperlinks to the data source.

Thanx again… trish

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The problem is that a cross reference points to one specific location in the document. Since a mail merge results in multiple copies of the original document within the merged document, there is no single location to point at any more – if you merged 37 records, the cross reference would point at 37 different locations. Since that is impossible, the cross references are removed.

I don’t know of an easy replacement.

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Thanx Hans… as usual, you know all the answers! Since the person will only be merging on item at a time… I will probably use a template with hyperlinks to the Excel document instead of using the mail merge feature… have a great day… trish

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