You can't. The two features are not designed to work together.

As an alternative, you could use a macro to create each new document from a
template in which you have formfields in place of the mergefields and
populate the relevant ones with data from the data source.
--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

"Trevor Drew" Trevor wrote in message
...
We would like to create a form that has some merged information on it, as
well as check boxes, dropdowns and form text fields. After the merge to a
new document, we would save it as a template and turn on document
protection
with a password. The recipient could then fill in the form, using the
check
boxes, drop-downs and text fields. However, when I merge the document,
the
form text fields disappear, whereas the check boxes and dropsowns don't.
How
can I make the form text fields survive the merge? We are at Word 2003
SP1.