Or perhaps you know a simpler solution to my problem? Something that doesn't
involve vba?

Hi Albert -

Funnily enough I'd just been working on this - unfortunately I won't have
time to complete this for at least a few days but the basic idea works. The
particular version I have to hand does not start with an Includepicture
field - it just gets the path you need from the mail merge data source and
stuffs the image in directly. I was going to look at the other method later
(which will now be at least a week away) but maybe this will be enough for
you. If you have experience with WOrd Events and VBA you can ignore some of
the following.

1. Create a new document, connect it to your data source, and insert one
merge field (otherwise you can't merge) and a bookmark named "mybm" where
you want thte picture to go.

2. Open up the VBA Editor and
a. insert a class module.
b. name it EventClassModule in the properties box
c. Copy the following code into the module:

Private Sub App_MailMergeBeforeRecordMerge( _
 ByVal Doc As Document, _
 Cancel As Boolean)
Dim strImagePath As String
Dim rngBookmarkToReplace As Range
Dim shpToReplace As InlineShape

' This routine replaces bookmark "mybm" by
' an inline picture whose path is speacified in
' the mail merge data source field "imagePath"
' This broadly replaces the need to insert a
' nested { INCLUDEPICTURE "{ MERGEFIELD ImagePath }" }
' field, which does not usually work when you merge to
' e-mail

' set the range variable to our placeholder bookmark
Set rngBookmarkToReplace = _
 Doc.Bookmarks("mybm").Range

' delete any existing text (this is needed for records after record 1)
rngBookmarkToReplace.Text = ""

' construct the image path. In this case we
' just get it from the data source

strImagePath = _
 Doc.MailMerge.DataSource.DataFields("imagePath")

' Insert the image. You might want to have some code
' that does something else if the file cannot be found
Set shpToReplace = _
 Doc.InlineShapes.AddPicture( _
   FileName:=strImagePath, _
   Range:=rngBookmarkToReplace)

' Set mybm to "cover" the inserted link so it is easy to delete the old
Hyperlink

Doc.Bookmarks.Add Name:="mybm", Range:=shpToReplace.Range

Set rngBookmarkToReplace = Nothing
Set shpToReplace = Nothing

End Sub

3. Insert an ordinary module (the name does not matter) and insert the
following code:

Dim x As New EventClassModule

Sub autoopen()
Set x.App = Word.Application
End Sub

4. Save and close the document. Open it to trigger the autoopen, then
perform a test merge.

NB, if you start changing the code you may find that you need to re-run your
autoopen code again, and/or save/close/open the document.

Peter Jamieson