Mail Merge Tips from Experience

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About this lesson

Learn tips for label margins and email merges.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Word documents from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Mail Merge Tips from Experience.docx
14.1 KB Mail Merge Tips from Experience - Solution.docx
19.4 KB

Quick reference

Mail Merge Tips from Experience

Label margins and Email merges have pesky issues that are easily solved with just a few clicks. Learn tips for label margins and email merges.

When to use

If you use labels, you need to know how and why to fix the margins.

If you use Email merges often, there is a more efficient process that will save time and frustration.

Instructions

To fix the margins on a label document,

  1. Double Click the left ruler
    (or go to Page Layout ribbon, Margins, Custom Margins)
  2. Adjust the margin from .19 to .25
  3. Click IGNORE on the error message
  4. Happily print your labels knowing the text will stay inside the label cut line.

If you use Email merges and the problem shown in the video lesson “Mail Merge to Emails” is more than you want to handle, there is an easier method.

  1. Start with Outlook.
  2. Click Contacts, and select the folder with the contacts to use in the Email Merge
  3. On the HOME ribbon, click Mail Merge
  4. Merge to: E-mail 
  5. Enter a Subject line and click OK
  6. MS Word will open in the background with no conflict of trying to share a Contact database. 
  7. Type your email message
  8. Click Finish & Merge, “Send Email Messages”
  9. Click OK and the emails will immediately send out without having to close one program and re-open the other.

This is more efficient, less frustrating, and who wants to figure out how to work around programming issues?  Not us!

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  • 00:05 There are a couple of things I want to tell you from experience.
  • 00:08 I've been doing Microsoft Word Mail Merges for 20 some years and so
  • 00:12 I've learned a couple of things and one of them is about the labels.
  • 00:15 So I've opened up the label, the label solution from our previous lesson.
  • 00:22 And I want to tell you that over here on the left hand side,
  • 00:25 I would highly recommend that when you first print your labels,
  • 00:29 print the first page to a blank sheet of paper,
  • 00:31 hold that sheet of paper over your actual label sheet, hold it up to a light.
  • 00:36 And you will see that the very cut edge on that label
  • 00:39 is gonna come right on the edge of these letters.
  • 00:42 Now if you load those labels into your printer, and they're at all crooked
  • 00:46 in the feed, these letters are going to print out on the margin, and
  • 00:50 it's going to ruin your labels, and those are expensive.
  • 00:54 So here's how to fix that.
  • 00:55 Over here on the left hand ruler right over here, if you double click this ruler,
  • 00:59 it's a quick trick to get into your margins.
  • 01:02 And the problem is that the default margin on those labels is 0.19.
  • 01:07 I guarantee you every time you print,
  • 01:09 these letters are going to be on the cut line of that label.
  • 01:12 We want to give it some room.
  • 01:14 So all we do is change it to point two five.
  • 01:17 Now when I hit okay it's going to give you a scary message.
  • 01:20 Oh, you don't know what you're doing.
  • 01:22 Yes I do.
  • 01:23 And we're going to hit ignore, but I want you to keep your eyes right over here.
  • 01:27 And I'll click ignore and you'll see that.
  • 01:29 See it just nudged over, just enough.
  • 01:32 So now when you load your labels, if they're at all crooked, it doesn't matter.
  • 01:35 We gave it just enough room to be well enough on the inside of that cut line.
  • 01:40 All right, so that's the label tip that I figured out many years ago.
  • 01:43 Now I'm going to show you the email merge tip.
  • 01:47 I had to open my Outlook file so you could see this.
  • 01:50 So the email merge that in the video when we went to email merge from wordpoint and
  • 01:56 we had that little problem of two programs using the same database.
  • 02:00 Here's how to solve it.
  • 02:01 Just start with Outlook in the first place.
  • 02:04 So if you open up your Outlook and you're looking at the contacts file you wanna use
  • 02:08 if your eyes go right up above you'll see a Mail Merge button.
  • 02:12 When I click Mail Merge,
  • 02:13 it's gonna ask me basically the same questions that Word does.
  • 02:17 Form letters?
  • 02:19 Yes.
  • 02:20 Email?
  • 02:20 Yes.
  • 02:21 Subject line, type in test.
  • 02:23 When I hit okay, it is now going to open Microsoft Word document which happened in
  • 02:28 the background and that's okay and hit okay to that one.
  • 02:31 And now I can type my email message right here.
  • 02:37 And, then when I hit Finish & Merge, I can go ahead and send the email messages.
  • 02:43 And when I hit OK, they will send out.
  • 02:46 Now the beauty of using Outlook,
  • 02:47 is that Microsoft Word isn't already pointing to a database.
  • 02:52 Just Outlook is using the database, going in and
  • 02:55 using a perfectly blank sheet of paper, and then finishing in the same database.
  • 03:00 It's actually more efficient to use Outlook if you're doing an email merge.
  • 03:03 Start with Outlook, finish with Outlook.
  • 03:06 Instead of starting with Word, bumping and fighting with Outlook.
  • 03:10 So just from years of experience,
  • 03:12 I thought it would be a good idea to share that with you.

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