I’m told that a “mail merge” is time-saving feature of word processing. What exactly is a mail merge, and how do I perform one?
Whoever told you that a mail merge can save time is quite right - mail merging is a feature wherein you compose one “template” document and combine it with an external set of data. You place “merge fields” throughout your document template, to be replaced by actual data from your external data source. Once you have finished composing your template, you can generate and print any untold number of copies, each personalized with the data from your external data source. That external data source can be one of a few things: a spreadsheet, a database, your e-mail client’s address book, a text file, a CSV file or any other type of delimited data. The steps to performing a mail merge are:
- Compose or gather the data in your external data source.
- Attach the data source to your template document.
- Compose your template document.
- Merge in the external data.
Compose or gather your data in your external data source
We’re going to keep a set of addresses in an Excel spreadsheet for this tutorial. It doesn’t get any easier than this:
Attach the data source to your template document
Our template document does not exist yet, so we’ll create a blank document in Word. Once your blank document is open, start the mail merge selecting it from the Tools menu. In most versions of Microsoft Word, you’ll click on Tools, then click on Mail Merge. If you have the latest version, click Tools, click Forms and Letters, then click Mail Merge. You’ll see this window:
Under Main Document click on Create. In the box that pops up, click on Active Window.
Next, under the Data Source section, click on Get Data and select Open Data Source. Use the Open Data Source window that pops up to locate the spreadsheet of addresses that you just composed, click on the spreadsheet’s icon and press the Open button. A Microsoft Excel window will ask you which portion of data you want from the spreadsheet… select “Entire Spreadsheet”. Word will now present you with this warning:
Word is simply saying that you’re ready to go back and compose your template document, so click on the Edit Main Document button and you will be sent back to… that’s right… your template document.
Compose your template document
We feel like going skiing. As such, we’ll use this mail merge to send an invitation to each person in our contact list. The most essential part of composing your template document is placing the merge fields; merge fields are placeholders that are replaced by actual data later on. To place a merge field, put the cursor where the merge field should start and click the Insert Merge Field button in the Word toolbar. When you press the “Insert Merge Field” button, a dropdown menu will appear and show you the names of all the columns in the spreadsheet.
Place each field into your document by clicking on its name, one by one. When you’re done, your document will be filled with placeholders like so:
Merge in the external data
Once you’re done composing your document and inserting the merge fields, the only step left is to merge in the data. In this case, we’re going to merge in the data by printing the document. Click on the “merge to printer” button, which is in the toolbar and has a picture of a document pointing to a printer. It looks like this:
When you press this button the printer dialog box will open up. Press the Ok button and not one but six copies of your document will print out, each one addressed to a different person from your spreadsheet of addresses.
[tags]mail merge,microsoft word[/tags]
