Microsoft® Office Word 2007 Plain & Simple

Mail Merge: The Power and the Pain

Mail merge is a tool that combines two different parts into a sleek and well-crafted whole: that is, a series of identical printed documents (form letters, for example) with the appropriate information (individual names and addresses) inserted automatically into each document. The two parts are the master document and a data source. The master document is the template (although not a template in the Word-document sense) that lays out your document and contains text or other items that never change. The master document also contains instructions for inserting data from a data source into each document. The data source is a uniform collection of information from one of a number of sources.

Mail merge is an almost ...