Under the hood

To better understand the way mail merges are executed in Mail Merge for Microsoft Access consider the following use case.

Make the document and a html document to be used as body of an email to be sent to a list of contacts.

Access Mail Merge is made flexible using the process- activities model to allow for this kind of processing. The process would go like this:

Process: e-mailmerge
   Record 1 in process
        Activities
            Activity (MailMerge doc rec 1)
            Activity (SaveAs doc rec1)
            Activity (MailMerge html rec 1)
            Activity (SaveAs html rec 1)
            Activity (E-mail to list with body= html rec 1 and attachment = doc rec 1)
   Record 2 in process
        Activities
        …

For this
a. the  SaveAs the process needs to be informed that it gets the (document)object passed which is created by the MailMerge,
b. the email will need to know which files are to be used for each record being processed.
Note that SaveAs could have been implemented as an additional set of properties of the Mail Merge activity. However we prefer an uniform and balanced process-activity approach.