Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Word 2003

Selecting a Starting Document

Your next step in merging a document is to choose or create the document you will use as your main document. This, again, is the document that contains any boilerplate text that should appear in all your merged documents and instructions about which kinds of information should be merged into them (known as mail-merge fields). Typically, Word gives you three choices (see Figure 17.3):

• If you choose Use the Current Document, you can go on immediately to select your document's recipients. In fact, you must—Word 2003 doesn't allow you to edit your current document until you've done so.

• If you choose Start from Existing Document, Word displays a list of any mail-merge documents you've worked with recently. If the document ...