Recently I had to create a lot of Microsoft Office Word documents based on the same template, so I decided to use Mail Merge. Unfortunately when you generate a document from a defined Mail Merge template in Word, you end up having all the pages inside one huge document. But I wanted to have each form in a seperate word document.

To achieve this non-standard behavior, I wrote a little helper: execute the following VBA Macro on your Office Word Mail Merge template to have Word generate & save every record into a single file.

Attention
There is one thing to do manually, because I couldn’t solve it programmatically: you have to manually set the “Mail Merge Output” setting to “Current Record”! (default is “All”)

Here’s the VBA code for the Macro:

Option Explicit

Sub MailMergeSaveEachRecordToFile()

'

' Save each single Mail Merge Record into a seperate Document

'

Dim rec, lastRecord As Integer

Dim docNameField, strDocName, savePath As String



' Choose Folder dialog (Mac and Windows)

If System.OperatingSystem Like "*Mac*" Then

    savePath = MacScript("(choose folder with prompt ""Select the folder"") as string")

Else 'Windows

    savePath = ActiveDocument.Path & "\"

End If



' If a destination folder has been selected

If savePath <> "" Then

    ' Turn off some visuals to speed things up a bit

    Application.ScreenUpdating = False

    Application.DisplayAlerts = False

    

    ' Find the last record of the Mail Merge data

    ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.ActiveRecord = wdLastRecord

    lastRecord = ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.ActiveRecord

    

    ' Ask for user confirmation to start creating the documents

    If MsgBox(lastRecord & " documents will be created based on your Mail Merge template.", vbOKCancel) = vbOK Then

        ' Ask for the name of the Merge Field name to use for the document names

        docNameField = InputBox("Which Mergefield [name] should be used for document name?")

        

        ' Create document for each Mail Merge record (loop)

        For rec = ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.FirstRecord To lastRecord

            ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.ActiveRecord = rec

            

            ' Set document name for current record

            If Trim(docNameField) = "" Then

                strDocName = "document" & rec & ".docx"

            Else

                strDocName = ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.DataFields(docNameField).Value & ".docx"

            End If

            

            ' Execute Mail Merge action

            With ActiveDocument.MailMerge

                .Destination = wdSendToNewDocument

                .Execute

            End With

           

            ' Save generated document and close it after saving

            ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=savePath & strDocName

            ActiveDocument.Close False

            

            ActiveDocument.MailMerge.DataSource.ActiveRecord = wdNextRecord

        Next rec

        

        ' Re-enable screen visuals

        Application.ScreenUpdating = True

        Application.DisplayAlerts = True

        

    Else 'if no destination folder was selected

        'Re-enable screen visuals

        Application.ScreenUpdating = True

        Application.DisplayAlerts = True

        Exit Sub

    End If

End If



End Sub

An alternative approach is to split the generated mail merge document based on the section breaks that word inserts when executing mail merging. For me this was not working because of special formatting and tables inside the tempalte document.