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Welcome, in this video I’m going to show you how to set up a data document for a word mail merge
Now a data document is basically the document that contains all of the names and addresses that you want to use in the merge and there are numerous ways you can set up a data document
In this video we are going to look at a couple of ways
We are going to look at setting up a data document inside of Microsoft word and we are also going to see how to set up a data document inside of Microsoft excel
First we’ll go ahead and look at word
You can see I have just a blank document open here
I’m going to go ahead and open up an existing data document
You can see I have one here called word address list I’ll go ahead and open that up
You can see a data document is just simply a blank document that you’ve inserted a table on and then added the information
So very easy to set up
I’m going to close this
And we are back at our blank document
So the first thing I need to do to set up this data document is to create a table with two rows and the number of columns equal to the number of fields I want to use in the mail merge
Well I want first name and last name, so that’s two
Address, city, state, and zip code which brings us up to six columns
I’m going to go ahead and go to the insert tab up at the top and select table and you simply select the number of rows and number of columns that you want
And again I’m going to start off with a six by two table
Now this doesn’t mean that you can’t add more than one record it just means you’re going to add in the rows as you enter in the information
So a simple six by two table here
Now the first row in your table needs to be the names of the different fields that you are going to use
So I’m going to go ahead and type first name here, last name, address, city, state, zip code
And you want to give word a little bit of a hint as to the fact that that is the header row
So I’m going to simply highlight the row and make it bold so it will stand out and that will give word a clue that this isn’t actually a record to be merged but it is the heading
And then you just simply type in the names that you want
And notice that I didn’t do any formatting of these columns and you don’t need to, if the content wraps that’s fine
Now in a table when you get to the end of the table if you hit the tab key once it inserts a new row for you so I can continue to enter in information
And again I’m not worried about formatting at all I’m just typing in the information
And I’ll hit tab again and that gives me a new row
If you accidentally add a new row when you don’t need it it won’t hurt the mail merge at all but if you want to undo it you can just hit undo
So there are the beginnings of a very simple table that will be the data document for a mail merge
Now you can set up a data document in excel in exactly the same way
I’m going to bring up excel here and I’ve already opened up a sample data document
And again you can see excel, this is just a table of information, with the first row containing the field names
And you just enter in the information and save it
And that’s all there is to creating a data document for a word mail merge.