Office 2013 Digital Classroom

Word Lesson 7: Creating Mail Merges

By linking your document to a data source such as an Access 2013 file, you can create a personalized mass mailing called a mail merge. This lesson puts Word’s field codes to work to produce a half-dozen form letters, each subtly personalized for its individual recipient.

What you’ll learn in this lesson:

• • Linking your Word document to a database
• • Using fields to pull data into a form letter
• • Building a flexible document structure with conditional fields
• • Merging your table data into a final printed document or e-mail

Starting up

You will work with files from the Word07lessons folder. Make sure that you have loaded the OfficeLessons folder onto your hard drive from www.digitalclassroombooks.com/Office2013. For more information, see “Loading lesson files” in the Starting up section of this book.

Mail merges

You’ve already seen how fields can be used to insert content into a Word 2013 document, but until now, you’ve worked with fields that contain just a single piece of data: the current date and time, a document’s author and title, or the page/section numbers of a given location in the document. Moreover, in previous lessons you worked only with field codes and document properties specific to a given document, you haven’t had to make Word look outside your .docx to fill any field with data.

But Word is designed to work hand-in-hand with other ...