Office 2013 In Depth

Performing a Mail Merge

The commands you use to perform a mail merge are found in the Start Mail Merge group (on the Ribbon’s Mailings tab). As already mentioned, the merge process requires that you have a document such as a form letter and that you also have a data source. The process of performing the mail merge consists of four distinct parts: creating or opening the merge document; creating or specifying the data source; inserting the merge fields into the main document; and running the merge, which creates the form letters, envelopes, and so on.

Each of these four actions can—and probably does—require that you perform a subset of tasks. For example, to create merged letters during the merge process, you must supply the initial form letter. ...