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In this video I want to show you how to do a form letter mail merge using Microsoft word
Now whenever you do a mail merge you’re going to be working with two documents
One document is called your main document and the other document is called your data document
The main document in the case of a form letter is going to be the actual letter that you wish to merge
The data document is going to be the list of names and addresses that you want to include in the mail merge
So you’re always going to have two documents completed, your form letter and your data document
If you haven’t set up a data document before we have another video showing you how to set up a data document in either word or excel.
Now I’ve gone ahead and set these two documents up ahead of time
I’m going to go ahead and open up my form letter
I’m just going to go ahead and, there it is right there, click open. And here is an example of my form letter
And you can see in the form letter I left some room for the address box right up here at the top
There is also a spot to put dear and the person’s first name
So this is the letter that I want to use so I’m going to begin here
Now again, your data document should already be created and saved on your computer
You should not have that data document open though, the only document you should have open is your main document
So once I have this document open I can come here to the mailings tab in the ribbon
Now, to start the mail merge you’re going to come here the start mail merge section
And basically this is going to be really simple because you’re just going to follow the ribbon left to right through the different steps
The first step is clicking on start mail merge here, this will let you choose what kind of document you want to create
In our case we want to create a form letter so I’m going to click on letters
Now nothing happened there to confirm that choice for you but you have told the computer that this is a form letter in mail merge
The second step is going to be to choose the document that has the data that you wish to merge into this document
The names the addresses, all that good stuff
I’m going to go ahead and click on select recipients and we are going to use an existing list
And again this is the most simple, straightforward way to do a mail merge
And again I’m going to go ahead and open up my existing list and it’s a word address list
And again if you have set up a data document before we have a video on doing that
So I’m going to go ahead and open that up
So now you’ve said this is a form letter and you’ve also told the computer where the data is
Now, the data for your mail merge should be in that other document and it should be complete and edited
If you wanted to go ahead and make a quick edit you do have edit recipient list but you’re going to find more consistent and lasting results if you just simply open the document up and edit it directly
But you could click here and make some edits in this dialog box
The place this dialog box really helps though is with sorting and filtering information
You can see right now there is no real order to the data that I’m using in this mail merge
But I could really quickly click on the word last name there to sort them in ascending order
I could do the same thing for state, zip, so it’s real easy to sort these items
If you wish to exclude somebody from the mail merge you can also check and uncheck their boxes right here
There are more things that you can do with this dialog box that we’ll talk about in another video
But again, the two most common things that people want to do here one is sort the list and the other is exclude records which you can uncheck the boxes
So I’m going to click ok there
And I’m back in my main document
Now I left myself some room here to put the address block for this letter
So I’m going to come right here and I’m going to click on address block
And you can see the way the name is going to be formatted here and you can also get a preview of the way the name and the address are going to print out there
I’m going to click ok there
And you’re going to see that address block is placed right there
Now that’s actually a field it’s not the text that’s going to be used it’s just a field
You can always tell if something is a field or if it’s actual text by clicking on it
You can see when I did that it sort of highlighted itself in gray
You can also see the range operators on either side of that
Now we want it to say “dear” and person’s first name and then a comma
So what we are going to do is, you could use the greeting line there, but we are going to pull the first name out of that
So I’m going to come here to insert merge field, again I clicked where I want that field to go
Insert merge field, and I’m going to select first name there
And again you’ll see that field is placed in there
And then I’m going to click at the end of the row and type a comma because I want a comma to come after that
So we have said put an address block here and put a first name here
Now we’re ready to go ahead and preview to see how our letters are actually going to look
So I’m going to click on preview results and there is the address information and the first name replacing the fields we inserted in the document
If I click on preview results again it turns that off and brings me back where I can began editing and working on this
so maybe if you put the wrong field in you can come back in here and take care of that or you could choose a different recipient list if you wanted to
But my preview looks good and this is the way I want it to look so I’m going to click finish and merge
You also if you have adobe acrobat you have an option to finish and merge to an adobe PDF file instead of to a word document
But I’m going to come here to finish and merge and I’m going to say edit individual documents
And it’s going to ask me which records me want to merge and I want to merge them all. I’m going to click ok
And now we have another document open that has all that information inside it
You can see there is our second name, our third name, and so on
And that’s all there is to creating a form letter with a word mail merge