The Mail Merge feature of Microsoft Word is a great way to produce a large number of personalized letters or labels in a short amount of time. The process can seem daunting to a beginner, but if you break it down into a series of steps, is very easy to manage.
The Mail Merge process basically involves taking two files and merging them together. The first file is a letter, which is a basic word document. The second is a list of recipients. This list could be a table in Microsoft Word, but most often it is a worksheet in Excel. In this example, we will use an Excel spreadsheet and a simple letter that has already been created in Word.
While your letter is still open in Word, click the Mailings tab at the top, select the Start Mail Merge option, and choose Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard. A new pane will appear on the right-hand side of your screen. Under the first section that says Select document type, choose Letters. Step by step guide on how to do a mail merge email with office for Mac. First, some basic principles on mail merge emails for those who aren’t familiar. Mail merge emails are written and managed from Word, not from Outlook. All data that will be “merged” into the email is taken from an excel file.
1. Prepare the List of Recipients
The list of recipients is simply a table of names and addresses. There must be only one row of column headers at the top of the table, and each column headers should be unique. It will save some time later if you use a few standard labels in the column headers, such as, Last Name, Street, City, etc. I have prepared a very simple table of names and addresses in the file Mail_Merge_Recipients.xlsx. If you look carefully, you will note that the Postal Code column is set as text, which is why the ZIP codes appear on the left side of the cells. Unfortunately, this is mandatory: You must set the Postal Code column as text. Otherwise the leading zeros that are used in certain U.S. ZIP codes will be truncated off by Excel when it exports it to Microsoft Word. (This problem will occur even if you use the special Zip Code format of Excel.) Close the Excel file and proceed to the next step.
2. Prepare the Letter Document
You can use almost any document in Mail Merge. I have prepared a simple letter with the file name Mail_Merge_Letter.docx. The date near the top is set to update every time we create a new batch of letters, which is a good idea for a Mail Merge letter. There is a placeholder for the Inside Address and another for the salutation line. (We could also put some information from the recipient list into the body of the letter. For example, we can add the line, “I hope things are going well in X,” Where X would be substituted by the recipient’s city. But such simple-minded gimmicks impress nobody, and for this example we’ll keep things simple.)
3. Start the Mail Merge
In Microsoft Word, if you want to start a Mail Merge, you will of course go to the Mailings tab. In that tab, click the button: Start Mail Merge. A menu of possibilities appears, and easiest choice is to go to the bottom and employ the Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard. So far, pretty simple, right?
4. Choose the Document Type
The Mail Merge Wizard has just six steps, the first of which is the easiest. It defaults to creating a letter, which is exactly what we want. So, all you need to do is go to the next step. Click the button at the bottom right-hand corner: Next: Starting document.
5. Choose the Document
We already have our document open, so all we need to do is click Next: Select recipients. (I told you it was easy!)
6. Choose a Recipient List
Now we choose the second ingredient in our Mail Merge recipe, the list of recipients. Click the Browse button and browse to the Excel spreadsheet that we looked at earlier. A dialog box should open up, showing all of the rows and columns of our Excel spreadsheet. To the left of each row there are checkboxes which we can use to manually select who should receive our letter. Also, note that each of the column headers has a filter button, a drop-down arrow which we could use to select which groups of recipients will receive the letter. (We could also use these filter buttons to sort our letters. In some cases, we can get discounted postal rates if we were to sort the letters in the order of their ZIP Codes.) In this example will leave all our recipient selected so that everyone will receive one of our amazing letters. Click OK to close the dialog box, and then click Next: Write your letter.
7. Write the Letter
Well, our letter is pretty much already written. But we do need to add two things: the inside address, and the salutation or greeting line. Delete the text that says Inside Address and leave the mouse pointer on that line. In the Mail Merge task pane at the right, click the option: Address block. A dialog box will appear asking you to confirm that the name and address information is correct. After you click OK, a merge field code will appear in your letter. This code is distinguished by the double angle brackets that enclose it. As with all fields, Microsoft Word will replace it with some relevant information, in this case, a few lines that list the name and address of the recipient. Because we used standard labels in the column headers of our Excel spreadsheet, Word knows how to combine the name and address information in a suitable way. (If we had not used standard labels, we would now have to tell Word which of our labels corresponds to the standard labels, so that Word could assemble the address block as needed.)
Next, we have to add the salutation or greeting line. Delete the text now in the salutation and click the Greeting line option in the task pane on the right. A dialog box will appear asking you to confirm the structure of the salutation. Because this is a business letter, we need to change the punctuation to a colon. Click the list arrow at the right near the comma and change it to a colon. Then click OK.
In this step, we have added two merge fields. Be sure there is a blank line below each merge field. It looks a little cryptic right now, but that will soon change—as soon as you click Next: Preview your letters.
8. Preview the Letters
Prepare to be amazed: In this step, the merge fields have been replaced with actual data. You can use the arrow buttons to move forward or backward in your recipient list to see how each of the letters will appear. If you see any mistakes regarding line spacing or word spacing in the salutation, this is a good chance to fix that. Assuming that everything looks fine, let’s go on to the next step. Click Next: Complete the merge.
9. Perform the Mail Merge
Before we do the actual merge, it’s a good idea to save our work: Press Ctrl + S. Now, as you can see in the task pane on the right, there are two basic choices. If everything looks pretty good so far, you can take a chance and click the button: Print. This will merge our letter with our recipient list and print out X number of letters. But if there’s a mistake someplace in the letter, you may print out X number of mistakes.
If you’re the more cautious type like me, the better choice is: Edit individual letters. This creates a new document which is composed of all the individual letters that are created in the Mail Merge process. We can now go through this batch of letters and correct any mistakes. We could also add a little personalization to a particular letter, for example, “I enjoyed seeing you at the park last week.” After we make our choice, Word will ask you to confirm that you want to print all the letters, which you usually want to do.
In the new “Letters” document that appears, note that each of the letters is separated not by a Page Break, but by a Section Break (Next Page). This means that each of the individual letters are actually sections of the document. I’m not sure why Microsoft chose to break up the letters this way, but it does have an important consequence for us: If we want to print only certain letters in the document, we would specify not their page numbers, as we would usually do. Instead, we must specify the section numbers. That is, instead of entering 1, 4, 7, in the box for Pages to be printed, we would instead enter: S1, S4, S7.
Let’s assume that all the letters look fine, and we have plenty of paper and ink in our printer. What we need to do now is print the Letters document. Once it is printed, the Letters document is no longer needed. We can use the original letter document we just saved a moment ago to create a new collection of letters in just a few mouse clicks. So, close the Letters document without saving it. The original mail-merge letter document will now appear, and that should be saved for possible reuse in the future.
10. Celebrate!
Well, it turned out to be even easier than I thought. Really only nine steps! Practice this a few times, and pretty soon you’ll be able to do it all by yourself—without the wizard.
Of course, there is one more step: If we want to mail these letters, we need to print either labels or envelopes. Sorry, we’ll have to leave that for another lesson.
— Rich Malloy
Mail merge can be used in various correspondences, be it in business or personal letters. For instance, you need to send a standard letter to a large number of clients, or perhaps you want to send a Christmas greeting to your family and friends. The purpose of mail merge is for creating a set of documents that are essentially the same, only where in certain parts of each document contains unique elements. For whatever purpose you will use this feature, the general approach is the same. In this article, we are going to utilize the step by step method which is the Mail Merge Wizard.
Prepare data for Mail Merge
The data for mail merge can be prepared in several ways, but an example of a data is prepared in simple tabular form on an Excel spreadsheet. In our data below, we have the names of the recipients and their addresses. We can also put the salutation for each person.
Mail Merge Wizard
No Mail Merge Wizard In Word For Macs
Now that we have our data, let us access the Mail Merge Wizard in Word 2010. Go to the Mailings tab, click on the Start Mail Merge button. This particular button presents us with a number of options, but we are going to focus on the one found at the bottom which is the Step By Step Mail Merge Wizard; this will give us an overall idea of how mail merge works.
We currently have a blank document and on the right appears the Mail Merge Task Pane. The wizard will take us through the steps of a mail merge.
Step 1: First, we choose the kind of document we are going to create. Let us start with creating a Letter. Click on Next: Starting document.
Step 2: Next is we are asked how we want to setup our letter. For this example, let us choose Start from a template. Click on Select template which brings up a dialog. Let us go for Urban Letter which is found in the Letters tab; you may choose other templates as appropriate. The template is loaded to our previously blank document. Click on Next: Select recipients.
Step 3: Now we are going to select the recipients of the letter. Since we have prepared our data, we are going to Use an existing list. Click on Browse, look for the spreadsheet, and click on Open.
If our spreadsheet contains multiple sheets, a dialog comes up asking us to select the sheet that has our data. Then the Mail Merge Recipients dialog comes up confirming if we have the correct data. Click on OK.
Step 4: We are now going to write our letter. Delete the contents of the template where it says type recipient’s name and address, and replace it with the Address Block that Word has prepared for us.
The Insert Address Block dialog gives us a Preview of how one of our recipient’s name and address will appear in our letter. We can also change the format of the recipient’s name here. Click OK.
Same thing for the salutation; delete the contents of the template where it says type the salutation. Click on Greeting line from the Mail Merge Task Pane.
Mac Mail Merge Labels
On the Insert Greeting Line dialog, we also have the option to change the format of the salutation and we get a preview of how it will look on our letter. If satisfied, click on OK.
Step 5: We are now ready to preview our letters. On the Mail Merge Task Pane, there is a pair of controls to step us through the letters. We also have the options to Edit recipient list and Exclude a recipient. Click on Next: Complete the merge for the final step.
Step 6: Lastly, we complete the merge by either selecting Print which will print all of the letters or by selecting Edit the individual letters should we need to make any changes on the letter for a particular person.
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