HI Gretchen,
Although not an expert with MS Word's mail-merge, the time it takes does not
seem right. I think Graham's questions are appropriate. I did however run
a test on my own software, OctoTools, to see what throughput I was getting
with its mail merge function. In the test I used a two page Rich Text
Format letter (composed in Word) with signatures on the 2nd page and merged
in data (names,address, honorifics and so on..) to produce a mail merged
output in PDF format. I ran it twice, first to create a single large PDF
document with all the letters (typical of going to a printer), and secondly
as a bursted output, separate PDF files for each letter or recipient. The
PDF output was sent to hard disk. In the first run, I processed on my Dell
Pentium-M 1.6 GHz laptop (512 Bytes of memory) at 330 pages per minute, and
in the second run (with bursting) I ran slower, as expected with a standard
4200 rpm lap top hard disk, at 130 pages per minute. In either case your
3-4 hours seems very wrong.
Larry
(OctoTools is designed more for medium to high volume throughputs and adds
forms design, rtf import, access to data and databases from both windows and
non-windows and non-pc based platforms and outputs to PDF format, Printers,
Excel CSV format, as well as automatic e-mail and web posting of the output.
It is a commercially available product that runs on a Windows workstation
or server to access, process and output data from a wide variety of current
platforms, applications, and legacy systems). For additional info give me a
call at 978 535-7676.
