Hi Steve,

This doesn't sound like a mailmerge at all, at least not in the sense that
Word uses the term. Having said that, and depending on what's in your source
file and where it does in the target file, that may necessitate the use of a
mailmerge approach.

What you're describing is, superficially at least, a linked document. In
this case, your c:\templatedir\document1.doc is the target and
c:\custdir\data.txt is the source. Linking would work well if your source
document contains a text string or a list that needs to be inserted as a job
lot into one location in the target document. If you create one of your
source files, and a 'test' file for use as a target document, use Word's
Insert|File tools from the menu to insert the text file as a link. This will
import the contents of the text file into your Word document. Next, change
the source file then press F9 in Word, and you'll see that the Word document
updates to reflect the changes. See INCLUDETEXT in Word's  Help file for
more info. If you want to save the file to rtf, with the link 'locked' to
prevent further changes, simply select ihe inserted material and press
Ctrl-Shift-F9 before saving. This process would be quite easy to automate.

However, if your source file has fields that need to be inserted into
different places in your target document, a mailmerge approach would
probably work better. In that case, you'd need your text files to have a
consistent, delimited structure; otherwise you wouldn't be able to control
which fields went where in the Word document. If, for example, some fields
are sometimes empty, the empty fields would still have to be included in the
text file - you couldn't simply leave them out and expect Word to work out
what's happened. provided you do that, this process would also be quite easy
to automate.

Cheers

c:\templatedir\document1.doc,c:\custdir\data.txt,c:\custdir\output1.rtf

c:\templatedir\document1.doc,c:\custdir\data.txt,c:\custdir\output1.rtf

c:\templatedir\document2.doc,c:\custdir\data.txt,c:\custdir\output2.rtf