Technology How To

With the combination of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word, the mail merge tool is an easy way to make a universal document that is personalized individually for a large list of people. The two most common uses of mail merge are in letters and labels. The following document shows the basic steps to complete a full mail merge for letters.
First, create a list of people who are to receive the letter. The spreadsheet can be created within Microsoft Excel 2007 and can include other information such as addresses, phone numbers, etc. However, for a letter mail merge, only the name fields are needed. Here is a sample spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel 2007:

It is very important to have field titles such as “last name, address, city, etc.” because these fields will be needed later in the mail merge. Be sure to break down fields to their smallest piece of data, for example, instead of using “name,” use “first name” and “last name.”

Save this spreadsheet in order to retrieve the list through Microsoft Word later.
Now that the spreadsheet is complete, open up Microsoft Word and create the letter that is to be sent to all of the people on the list. Leave the space after “Dear…” blank in order to leave room for the mail merge name fields.

When the letter is complete, access the mail merge options by selecting the Mailings tab on the Microsoft Word ribbon. Begin the mail merge by clicking on the Select Recipients option, and scrolling down to Use Existing List. Search through the hard drive for the already existing Excel spreadsheet.

Once the correct spreadsheet is selected, the “Select Table” box will appear. Highlight the sheet(s) necessary for the mail merge and click OK.

When complete, the name merge fields can be inserted. These will be placed directly after your greeting (i.e. dear , ) Click on the space located directly to the right of the greeting and then click on the Insert Merge Field option located in the Mailings tab.

You will notice that all of the title fields are included in this tab. However, for this letter, only the first and last name title fields are necessary for use.
Click on the First_Name title field; click the spacebar, then insert the Last_Name title field; insert a comma and the greeting should now look like this:

To check to see if the name merge fields were successfully inserted, click on the Preview Results button and scroll through the names using the arrow toggles in the Preview Results tab. Both options are highlighted in the image below.

Now, the names of the people on the list should have replaced the and fields within the letter as shown on the right. The names will change accordingly to the next person on the list when using the toggle arrows.

To complete the mail merging process, simply click on the Finish & Merge button and scroll down to Edit Individual Documents.

Select “All” when asked what records to merge. This will place the personalized letters in one document with each page addressing a different person on the chosen spreadsheet. Save and Print this document to complete the letter mail merge.