Word 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Mass Mailing with Mail Merge

When you need to write to 650 of your closest friends with a personal message that you know will be of the utmost interest to them, it’s time to dust off Word’s mail merge. The “merge” part is where this feature gets exciting. In a mail merge, you write your letter in Word, and then merge it with personal information (name, address, and so on), from another document or even another program (like Excel or Outlook). When Word prints out the 650 copies of your letter, the first one reads: Dear Charles; the second reads: Dear Sydney; the third reads: Dear Lucie; and so on. And you can use the same tools to print envelopes or labels or even non-mail-related chores. (Now, if only Word could lick the envelopes.)

In this chapter, you learn how to make mail merge jump through hoops. Some of this gets kind of geeky with the talk about fields and lists, but you get a big payoff in how much time you save when you use mail merge. This chapter starts out easy with the basics and the Mail Merge Wizard. You go through the whole step-by-step process of creating and printing a mail merge letter. The end of the chapter digs deeper into customizing mail merge for other projects and controlling mail merge using conditions you set up (rules).

Understanding Mail Merge Basics

Mail merge consists of two parts: a document and a list. The document is like a form with placeholders, such as “Dear <<FirstName>>” or “We are certain that <<CompanyName>> will quadruple its ...