The only things I can suggest are
a. consider using paragraph or character styles so that you
- massively reduce the size of the font used (by changing the font size of
the style) when you are editing, and set the font size of the style back to
the value you want prior to merging
- then use use view|zoom to make everything larger when editing
- use view|normal to view tables
b. create a record in the data source where each field has one letter or
digit and use the preview mode to view the /data/ in that record rather than
the view where you see <<fieldname>> or { MERGEFIELD fieldname }
c. rather than change the Access table field names, use an Access Query to
assign a short name to each field. (the SQL is SELECT longname1 AS `sn1`,
longname2 AS `sn2` etc.). That way, you keep the names you want in the main
tables in the database and compromise solely to solve this problem, plus the
shortname-to-longname mapping is documente din the Query definition so you
can easily rediscover it when you need to do any maintenance.

--
Peter Jamieson - Word MVP
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org/

the field names are several characters long. The problem is that the data is
being put into tiny little table cells that are too small for the long field
names, which makes formatting pretty difficult. Is there a way to display
the fields as something shorter than the whole field name? I vaguely
remember that in WordPerfect you could display a merge field as a red
diamond character, or something.

keep track of, so I don't really blame him. Any better ideas?