In the past I used Crystal reports to create a mailing and then
delivered pdf output to my customer.  It works okay, but I thought I
could take myself out of the picture if I setup a Word merge for them
to run instead.

The problem is that the Word merge is increbibly slow and locks up my
pc for about 15-20 minutes.   My pc is a Pentium(R) 4 cpu, 2.80 GHz,
2.79 GHz with1 GB RAM.  If that happens with my PC there is no way the
customer can use the merge.

Here's my info:
Data file:
 ~ 4,000 record .txt (comma separated or bar separated or tab
separated) file
 Each record contains 12 fields.
 One field is used twice on the merge form and another is used 3
times.

My configuration is
 Window XP (SP 2)
 Office 2003 (SP 2)

In Word, I have turned off pagination, and am using a Normal view.

Have tried turning off ALL other apps when running as well.

Saw some notes about speed issues with merging txt files.   Converted
import file to a .xls to see if that helped, but it did not.  Just as
slow.

Any ideas on how to speedup the process, or is this just the way Word
Merges work?

Thanks!
Patty

I had been planning on doing some if statements to prettyup the data
on the form... but now I am wondering if that is going to make a bad
situation worse...