There are 3 cells in the table. One is Product Code, two is Full
Description, and 3 is price.

I'm trying to do this in VBA because I want to do some manipulation of
output on the Full Description cell by bolding the first word when there is
a change of product category.

The retrieval of the recordset takes an acceptable amount of time, maybe 3
to 5 seconds. Then it's just Do While Not .EOF......

In tracing it looks like all the calls to the Word Object are time
consuming, especially the  Selection.InsertRowsBelow 1. I tried this also
with getting the count of the recordset as Z and doing
Selection.InsertRowsBelow Z. This took 16 minutes for the 21,500 records
with CPU usage at 100% the whole time. The update of cells in that scenario
was even slower!!!

Does anyone know what properties I need to set to get performance similar to
a standard mail merge? After all, that is also inserting rows into a table
(it's set up as a Catalog) and inserting text into the cells.

We can go back to the original mail merge but the formatting of the Full
Description cell would really make the client happy.

Thanks in advance,

Ross

How about determing the number of records in the recordset, then adding the
table from scratch with the required number of rows/columns ? Inserting a 3
column, 20,000 row table into a document took 2 seconds on my P300 machine !
If you absolutely have to append rows, just move the insertion oint to the
line below the table and add another table with the required number of rows.
This is very fast and the added table is incorporated into the original
table ie: running

    MsgBox ActiveDocument.Tables.Count

will return 1, no matter how many times this is done. As a last resort, you
could add each individual row by adding a 3 column, 1 row table rather than
using InsertRows. As I said before, if you add the "new table" just below
the existing one, it will be incorporated into the existing one.

--
Hope this helps.
Regards
ibby

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