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About this lesson
Auto-populate a form letter with various fields pulled from a list.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Mail Merge to Form Letters - Exercise.docx32.7 KB Mail Merge to Form Letters - Exercise Solution.docx
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Quick reference
Mail Merge to Form Letters
Merge mailing lists into a form letter with one time-saving process.
When to use
Manually entering data into multiple form letters is tedious and can be rampant with errors. If you have a mailing list already established, you can easily merge the data to a Microsoft Word document.
Instructions
- Begin with a blank document
- Click on the Mailings ribbon
- Start Mail Merge and click Letters:
In this exercise, we will use the Mailings ribbon rather than the Mail Merge Wizard.
- Select Recipients asks you where your list is. Choose one option: Use existing, Select from Outlook, Type a new list
- If you choose Type a new list, enter the data, click OK, and SAVE the file.
- If you click Use an existing list, the file system immediately opens and expects you to find your list. Do that and click OK or OPEN.
- Edit Recipient List button lights up and when clicked notice the options to sort and filter, or select only certain records.
- Click OK
- Address Block button
- In the letter click where the address will be located, click Address Block and make your choices in the dialogue box and click OK
- Notice the new field appeared
- Remove (delete) any other address information that is on the letter.
It is VITAL that you do not erase or delete the chevron marks on the field. They are codes.
- Greeting Line button
- In the letter, click where the salutation, or Greeting line, will be located
- Click the Greeting Line button and make your choices in the dialogue box and click OK
- Remove any other Salutation text.
- Insert Merge Field allows you to place specific data fields within the text of the form letter.
- Highlight Merge Fields will put a grey background (non-printing) behind the merge fields so you can easily see them within your form letter.
- Preview Results will display how the letter appears with the data displayed. Click the arrows to view the next and previous letters. Note: this is NOT the final document.
- Finish & Merge
It is recommended to Edit Individual Documents because it gives one last chance to preview and/or change each individual form.
- 00:04 In this exercise, we are going to do a mail merge to a form letter.
- 00:08 Now, a form letter is simply a full page letter,
- 00:11 any kind of document where you actually insert field codes into the letter.
- 00:17 Instead of having to retype every individual, company name, and address,
- 00:22 we just pull it from our mail merge list.
- 00:25 It's fantastic, let's go ahead and start the process.
- 00:28 On the Mailings ribbon, I won't be using the Step-by-Step this time.
- 00:32 I'm going to choose to just go through the Mailing ribbon from the left to the right.
- 00:37 I do have to tell it that I'm going to start with letters,
- 00:41 and it's going to be the one on my screen, and nothing really happens.
- 00:45 So now I'm going to select Recipients, and
- 00:49 I'm going to use the existing list that we've been using for the other lessons.
- 00:55 Activate that and hit Open.
- 00:57 Now, you won't see anything open actually right away, but
- 01:01 the Edit Recipient just lit up.
- 01:04 I'm going to click on that, resize the box, and mention once again,
- 01:07 Microsoft will fix this someday, but right now, at the time of this recording,
- 01:11 they are collapsing.
- 01:12 It's okay, I can still see everything.
- 01:15 Now, in the form letter, I'm going to pull in the entire address, but
- 01:19 then individually, I'm going to pop in their company name into the letter text,
- 01:24 and also the address line, clicking OK on this.
- 01:27 Let's go ahead and use the fields.
- 01:29 Notice on the Mailings ribbon, the Address Block, the Greeting Line,
- 01:33 Insert Merge Field, we're about to use these three.
- 01:35 I already have my address sitting right out here.
- 01:38 I'm going to delete this, click on the Address Block,
- 01:43 decide how formal or informal I want this to be.
- 01:47 If I have a different list that doesn't match the Microsoft fields,
- 01:52 I can hit this and match them up.
- 01:54 Clicking OK, now the AddressBlock showed up.
- 01:57 I can readjust how that lines up.
- 02:00 Please remember, if I accidentally delete those arrows,
- 02:04 I have just broken the mail merge, and
- 02:06 every letter will print with Chevron address block, and it'll look very bad.
- 02:11 So please make sure, leave those arrows alone.
- 02:14 What I like to do to make sure is to hit the Highlight Merge Field so
- 02:17 they stand out to me.
- 02:18 That gray area will not print in the background, but
- 02:22 it sure is a flag to me not to mess with it.
- 02:25 All right, let's go on to the Greeting Line.
- 02:27 Click under the Greeting Line where it says Dear FirstName.
- 02:30 Hit the button, Greeting Line.
- 02:33 And you can decide how formal you want to be in here.
- 02:37 Mr. Randall or just Joshua Randall, comma or colon.
- 02:43 And then what if you have a letter that doesn't have a name to it?
- 02:47 Well, you can choose Dear Sir or Madam, To Whom It May Concern, or
- 02:51 notice, there's a flashing insertion point in there.
- 02:54 That means I can type my own.
- 02:58 So if there is no name at all, I'll get a letter greeting line that just says Hello.
- 03:03 Go ahead and click OK.
- 03:05 Now, let's put the merge fields in.
- 03:09 Okay, now, I'm going to highlight the CompanyNameHere.
- 03:13 Click on the Insert Merge Field, notice I have a button on top and
- 03:17 a dropdown on the bottom.
- 03:18 The dropdown lets me choose one, but I have to go up and
- 03:21 hit it every single time.
- 03:23 The top button opens up the box.
- 03:27 I can hit Company Name here and hit Insert, but then I have to close it.
- 03:32 So I like using the dropdown arrow.
- 03:36 So I'll use the dropdown arrow, choose Address_Line 1, and it closes right away.
- 03:41 Either way, I have to go back up to the top.
- 03:43 Okay, at this point, let's test this thing.
- 03:45 Notice that I've got Preview Results right up here.
- 03:48 So I can turn the Preview Results on.
- 03:50 I do not like how that address is formatted.
- 03:53 And I can arrow to the right, arrow to the left, and check them all out.
- 03:57 Notice also, I only have one piece of paper over here, so this is not finished.
- 04:02 So right now, I can highlight this address line.
- 04:06 Come to the Home ribbon, change my line spacing.
- 04:11 Go back to the Mailings ribbon, turn off the Preview Results.
- 04:15 I love that, Dear FirstName, better get rid of that.
- 04:18 Okay, I think it looks good.
- 04:21 The last button is Finished & Merge.
- 04:24 This will create a brand new document with three pages in it.
- 04:27 Go ahead and click Finish & Merge.
- 04:29 I never send directly to the Print Documents, I like to have one last chance
- 04:34 to eyeball everything, clicking Edit Individual Documents.
- 04:39 Go ahead and click OK.
- 04:41 Take a look at the Navigation pane on the left-hand side, I do have three documents.
- 04:45 My return address is formatted fine, the company name,
- 04:49 the address came in just fine.
- 04:51 I probably would absolutely change the date before I finish that merge, but
- 04:56 at this point, I can print, I can save this document, use it again, or
- 05:01 just discard it.
- 05:02 So that is merging to a form letter.
- 05:04 We can put in specific fields within the letter that will
- 05:09 auto-populate depending on the individual information.
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