Publishing your Access application

Do I have to distribute Access Mail Merge with my application?

No, you don’t have to distribute the Access Mail Merge software with your application. The reason is that the document creation is implemented as pure VBA processes in your database. The only thing you need to distribute are the templates you created.

The only reason to install the software on your users machines is that having the ‘Access Mail Merge’ ribbon tab available saves your the effort of adding the macros to the ribbon or adding buttons to start the processes to your form – see Integrating mail merge processes in your application.

It is considered good practice to save and distribute your database application as compiled binary file (.accde). In that case the ‘Access Mail Merge’ ribbon tab automatically is reduced to the ‘Use’ group which only shows the ‘Create documents’ and ‘Open documents’ buttons.

More general info on distributing Access databases can be found here: Deploy an Access application