Mail Merge

Mail merge refers to a process by which a WordprocessingML document is connected to and populated with external data by a conforming hosting application and/or data source access application. A WordprocessingML document that contains the necessary data to connect to an external data source during a Mail Merge is known as a source document. In other words, a source document is a WordprocessingML document containing the elements and attributes necessary to enable the document to connect to an external data source, but not yet merged with any data.

Applications leverage source documents to generate new documents containing the static content contained in the merged document as well as data from the specified external data source. The documents that result from importing external data into a source document are known as merged documents. How source documents and merged documents are specified is explained in the following sections.