Mail Merge Data Source

Source Relationship:

http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships/mailMergeSource

A document that stores information about a mail merge operation is permitted to contain a Document Settings part (§11.3.3) whose relationship item targets the file location of the necessary data source using this relationship.

example:

<Relationships xmlns="…">
  <Relationship Id="rId1"
    Type="http://…/mailMergeSource"
    Target="http://www.openxmlformats.org/data.txt"
    TargetMode="External"/>
</Relationships>

The document’s Document Settings part contains a <dataSource> element< >that explicitly references this relationship:

<w:settings …>
  <w:mailMerge>
    …
    <w:dataSource r:id="rId1" />
    …
  </w:mailMerge>
</w:settings>

A mail merge data source shall be located external to the package containing the source relationship (expressed syntactically, the @TargetMode attribute of the <Relationship> element shall be External).