Mail merge is a very powerful feature that allows you to produce individual letters, emails, envelopes and address labels without having to type out the details one letter at a time.
Simple mail merge documents take information from a recipient list, such as a Word table, Outlook address book, spreadsheet or database, and use that information to fill in the gaps of the
main document.
When you run the mail merge, the merge fields are replaced with the data from the recipient list to give the impression of personalised letters.
Some of the more advanced features within mail merge allow you to further customise the letters by adding extra text if a certain condition is met, skip recipients or perform simple calculations.
The mail merge Wizard in Word XP makes it very easy to create mail merge letters. To run the mail merge Wizard in Word XP simply go to Tools | Letters and Mailings | Mail Merge Wizard.
The Wizard will open up in the right hand window pane.
Older versions of Word such as Word 2000 or Word 97 do not have a wizard so you would need to choose Tools | Mail Merge to open up the mail merge dialog boxes and work through the process step by step.
The Wizard asks whether you want to create letters, email messages, envelopes, labels or a directory. Because we are creating a document from scratch, choose the letters option.
When you click next, the Wizard asks whether you want to use the current document, create a new document from a template (such as the company letterhead) or start from an existing document (that is an existing mail merge document).
The Wizard then asks you to specify the recipient list (or data source in Word 2000).
You can either type a new recipient list directly into Word or use an existing list from a Word table, Web page, Outlook contact list, Excel spreadsheet, Access database, other data source or database query.
If you choose to create a new list, Word opens up a new address list dialog box with some example fields.
These are the fields that you generally require to send mail merge letters, however, you can easily customise the fields by clicking the customise button.
It is useful to include any relevant additional information in the recipient list as you can use this information to customise the merged letters or determine whether letters should be sent.
The customise address list dialog allows you to add, delete and rename fields (for example renaming Zip Code to Postcode).
Now type the recipient's details one entry (or record) at a time. This may seem tedious for the first mail merge, but the effort is paid back may times over when you reuse the recipient list for subsequent mail-outs. Once you have finished, you will be prompted to save the address list. Given that you will be reusing this list, make sure that you save it where you
will be able to find it again and back it up (unless you want to retype all of the information again if something goes wrong with your PC).
After you save the list, Word will give you an opportunity to review and edit the list and to select recipients.
In the future, you may be able to automatically validate address details, however, at the time of writing, this feature is not available for Australian and New Zealand users.
Now it's time to prepare the mail merge letter itself. After you click next, the Wizard allows you to enter the address block, greeting line and individual fields from the recipient list.
When you select one of the predefined blocks, Word automatically attempts to match the fields.
Provided you use the default recipient list field names, the data will match up. But if you extract data from another source (such as a marketing database), you will need to verify that the fields match. This can be done by clicking the 'Match Fields' box and checking that the field name contains the specific information.
After adding the address block and greeting, you can now work on preparing the letter as normal.
If you want to add a field from the recipient list (for example the person's name), simply choose 'More' items and select the field from the list.
Word will indicate that you have inserted a merge field by placing the field name between double less-than and greater-than signs.
For example, if you added a name field it would look like this: <<name>>.
When you click next, Word merges the letters giving you an opportunity to check that the merge is correct (before wasting paper or sending defective emails).
Now load your paper tray and hit the print option to begin printing your letters.