Mail Merge via ODBC

[bdam]

FileMaker's xDBC manual specifically lists Mail Merges in Microsoft Word as one of the uses for an ODBC link. Has anyone actually tried doing this?

It takes an absolutely incredible amount of resources, specifically RAM, if you have any significant number of records. I have a test database with 20 fields and 40 records and it takes minutes to load the field names and even longer to actually import the data. If you double that to 80 records you just might as well forget about it.

I am sharing the database using Server Advanced 8v4 on Windows Server 2003. I am trying to import into Word 2003. If I import into Excel it goes just fine.

Has anyone actually done this? Any pointers for how to get this to work in a reasonable time frame?