Hi everyone.
My name is Kevin.
Today I want to show you how you can use mail merge to create address labels.
So, what do I mean by that?
Well, imagine that you have a list of addresses.
So maybe in Excel or in Outlook, you have a list of maybe 30, 50, 60, maybe even hundreds
of addresses and you want to print each one of those addresses onto an address label.
Well, one way to do that is you could create a new address label sheet in Microsoft Word,
and you could go through, and you could copy and paste each address into one of the labels
and then you could print it out.
But that sounds really painful and that's also going to take a long time.
Today I'm going to show you how you can use mail merge in Word to greatly simplify that
task.
And as full disclosure before we jump into this, I work at Microsoft as a full-time employee.
All right, well what are we waiting for, Let's jump on the PC.
So here I am on my desktop and what we're going to do is we're going to open up Microsoft
Word.
This is the latest version.
This comes with Office 365.
If you have 2019, 2016, 2013 or any older version, this should work as well because
mail merge has been available for some time.
So here I am on the home screen.
Let's click into a blank document and what I'm going to do is click on the mailings pivot
on top because we're going to do a mail merge and to do a mail merge we go to mailings.
And what we're going to click on first is there's a section called start mail merge.
We're going to click on this first option, start mail merge and at the very bottom of
this list, there's an option that's called step by step mail merge wizard.
Wizards sound like they know how to do lots of things so let's see what the wizard can
help us with.
So, I'm going to expand this a little bit and it says what type of document are you
working on?
Well, I mentioned that we're going to do address labels, so let's go ahead and click on labels.
And what it says is print address labels for a group mailing.
Click next to continue.
Sounds easy enough.
Let's click next.
Starting document.
And now it says how do you want to set up your mailing labels and what I want to do
is we're just going to change the document layout.
So that sounds good, and it says click label options to choose a label size.
I'm going to go ahead and click on that and what you'll see is it pops up with this prompt.
Here I specify what type of printer I have.
I just have a standard page printer, so I'll select that, and then you can select the vendor
of your label.
So, if you bought labels on say Amazon or from Staples, there will be a vendor who created
those.
In this case I'm just going to go with Microsoft labels, but you also have things like Avery,
and you have all the different companies here.
But we'll just go with Microsoft and then you'll go through and select the product number.
So, if you bought address labels there should be some name for the product.
I'm just going to go with this 30 per page and you can see the details of the label here
so that should match the type of labels that you bought.
So, all that looks good.
I'm going to go ahead and click on OK.
So now I've selected the label option and we're going to go through and click on select
recipients.
Now what I want to do is I'm going to jump into Excel for a moment because this is where
I have my list of recipients.
So, I'll zoom in a little bit and just to orient you to the data that I have here, I
have one column with the name of the individual.
In the next column, in column B, I have their street address.
Then I have the city that they live in, the state, and the zip code.
So, this is all the data that I have in an Excel spreadsheet, and you can see I have
quite a few of these.
So, the last thing I would want to do is have to go through and insert these into a label
one by one.
So, I'm going to go back to Word and what we're going to do is I'm going to say use
names and addresses from a file or database.
So, I'll go ahead and click on browse.
What you could also do here is you could select from Outlook contacts, or you could even select
type in a new list.
So, I'm going to go ahead and click on browse and I'm going to go to my desktop where I
have this spreadsheet with all my names and addresses.
And you'll see here that you know the main worksheet is called sheet one and my first
row of data contains column headers.
So, if I go back, you see I have all my column headers here.
So, I'm going to go ahead and let's click on OK and now it pulls in all of my addresses.
So, there it goes.
I could even uncheck some if I don't want to include them on the mailing but in this
case, I'll leave all of them checked.
What's kind of neat too is I also have ways where I can refine the recipient list.
So here I could sort my list if I wanted to.
I could even filter it.
So here if I click on filter what I could say is you know maybe I only want to send
it to people in New Jersey so I could filter to New Jersey if I wanted to.
And you could add you know and another filter and maybe they live in a certain town, or
you could even have an or statement but we're not going to do that.
We're just going to send it to everyone on this list.
I could remove duplicates.
I could find a specific recipient.
I can even validate addresses.
So, there's really a lot of rich functionality here but I'm just going to go with kind of
the base full list and I'm going to click on OK.
So now you'll see that I'm in my address label sheet and I have all these.
You could see each one of the address labels I have 30 on the sheet.
And so, what I'm going to do now is it says the next step is to arrange my label.
So, I'm going to go ahead and let's click on arrange my labels.
And here what it says if I haven't done so already organize this so I'm going to click
on an address block.
And so here I could kind of see the formatting of what that looks like and I can go through
and so it has the name, the street, the city, the state, and the zip.
That looks great.
And I'm going to go ahead and insert it as is.
And so, what Outlook has or what Word has done is they've looked at my Excel data and
they've identified that those different columns form an address block.
I could also go through, and I could create my own label here but address block sounds
good.
That includes all the information I need.
And so, what I want to do now is this first one has the address block but none of the
other ones do.
And so, what I want to do now is I'm going to update all labels.
So, it says replicate labels.
You can copy the layout of the first label to the other labels on the page.
Well, that sounds good.
Let me click on that.
And so now you'll see that it says address block and the next record address block.
What the next record means is it simply goes to the next row in my spreadsheet and includes
the next person and then it puts that next person's address block down and it does that
for the entire sheet.
What we could do to make sure that things look right is I'll click on this preview results.
So, if I click there now, I can see the name, the street, the city, state, and zip, and
then I see the next person and my address labels simply go down like that.
I'm going to turn off the preview now and here the next step of the wizard actually
shows me a preview.
So, I can go through, and I can see all the recipients one by one.
This all looks great.
And now I can complete the merge so I'm just going to click on next.
And what it says is I can either edit individuals or I could just print out my address my mail
merge for address labels.
So, I'm going to go ahead and let's click on print.
And I want to print all the records, so I'll just click say all.
I could also say I just want to print you know a certain number of the current record
or I could say hey only you know my Excel sheet.
Let's say person 25 through 50 just them but in this case, I'm going to go with all.
And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to print a PDF to show you what this looks
like, but I could also just print to a printer as well.
I'm going to go ahead and click on OK and it's going to ask me now to save the PDF.
I'm just going to put it on my desktop and now it's printing it out.
So, let's see what this looks like.
So, I'm going to go back to my desktop and we're going to click on this PDF file.
And what you'll see happen now is I have a sheet with all the names the addresses, all
basically all the address information.
And so now if I were to print this to a printer and I had these address labels this would
successfully give me my 50 something address labels all customized to my Excel sheet.
So that's really all that's involved.
Once I'm done, I could save this, or I could just close it out and I'm pretty much all
done.
Anyway, hopefully this was helpful.
If this helped you figure out how to use mail merge to create address labels, please give
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And hey, that's all I have for you today.
Hope you enjoyed.
I'll see you next time.
Bye.