Okay welcome back.
It’s Cindy again.
We’re in module 12 and we’re talking about mail merges.
We’ve already gone through section 1 where we actually talked about what a mail merge
actually is and you got some instructions there on basically the steps that we’re
going to be going through.
So now we’re on section 2 and I want to show you how to go ahead and get started creating
that mail merge document.
When you’re creating a mail merge there are three steps that you’ll want to follow.
The first thing is you’ll want to create what’s called a main document.
A good example would be collection letters.
If you send them out every Friday then you want to go ahead and set that letter up as
a one-time thing and save it so that you can use that same letter every single week and
you don’t have to keep recreating it.
Main documents can be one of five different things.
They can be a letter, like the collection letter I just mentioned.
When you’re finished you’ll probably want also envelopes or labels.
So if you wanted to put envelopes in your printer and have it merge in all the names
and addresses you could do that.
Or you can print out labels and peel them off and put them on the envelopes.
You can also merge emails.
So if you wanted to send an email out to someone and you wanted to pull in again their pertinent
information then you’d be able to do that by merging emails.
You can also do a directory and I’ll talk to you a little bit later about what a directory
is.
Once you have your main document created then you want to go ahead and find your data source.
Now the data source is the actual information you’re going to pull into the main document.
So again as my example if it’s collection letters you want to pull in each person’s
name and their address, their invoice number, how much they owe, things like that.
Your data can come from a lot of different places.
You might have the data in Excel already.
You might have some sort of program that has the data and you pull that data.
But you can pull that data from pretty much anywhere you like.
Once you have the main document setup and you’ve got your data source then you can
merge the two and you get what’s called a merged document.
A merged document will have one page per record.
So that means if you send out 500 collection letters to 500 different people this one Word
document will have 500 pages.
So you probably do want to save your main document so you don’t have to recreate it
every time.
Data sources usually save somewhere already and the merged documents kind of up to you
if you want to save it.
So we’re going to actually go ahead and walk through the steps for creating the mail
merge here.
So we’re going to start on a new blank document to do this.
So I’ll just click on File and come down to New and I’ll use a blank document.
To start the mail merge you’ll want to go to the Mailings tab and you’ll see here
it says Start Mail Merge.
Here are the five things that I told you a main document can represent but we’re going
to use the step by step Mail Merge Wizard.
It’s much easier to go step by step this way so you don’t forget one of the steps.
We have not set up our main document yet and that’s why we’re starting on a new blank
document.
But if you had already created yours and saved it previously you could open that up to start
the process and it would automatically put you on step three of the wizard.
If you’ll notice down here at the bottom it tells you which step you’re on and you
can always go to the next step or the previous step here.
Now this is step one and the first thing it asks is what is it you’re working on.
Is it a letter, an email, an envelope, a label, or a directory?
We’re going to create our letter first.
Notice also whichever option you choose it’ll give you a little definition down here of
what that option actually represents.
So I’m going to click Next and it’s going to say, How do you want to set up your letters?
Do you want to use the current document?
Which we will.
But you could also start from a template or an existing document like I mentioned earlier.
I’m going to go ahead and click on Next which will put me on step three and it says
Select Recipients.
Now I’ve always thought this was a little backwards.
So you’re thinking I’m going to tell it that I want to create a letter.
I’m going to set up the letter and then go get the data.
But no, what it wants you to do is go get your data and then come back and set up the
document.
So that’s where we are now.
We’re going to tell it where our data actually is.
Here we can use an existing we already have somewhere, in Excel for example.
We could select from Outlook or type a new list.
We’re going to say at this point that we don’t have a list.
So we’re going to type a new list.
And then it says here to create.
When you’re creating a new list the first thing you need to do is set up the fields,
or the columns as you may see it, of information that you want to keep.
What they give you here is a generic list and you can edit this list.
So you can see this list goes Title, First Name, Last Name.
If I come down here where it says Customize Columns here’s the list.
I’m going to go down the list and take a few of these out.
Let’s say that I don’t want Address Line 2.
So I’ll go ahead and delete that.
And any time you delete a field it will actually ask you are you sure you want to do this because
if you already have data in there then you delete that data as well.
I’m also going to take out everything from country or region down in this case.
And by the way you’ll always get these generic fields.
You can actually go through like I’m doing and delete them or take out ones you don’t
want and add new ones.
Now I want to add one more.
I’m going to click Add here.
And I want this field to say Date Last Called and I’ll click OK.
You have the ability to move your fields up or down in the list because you want them
in a really good typing order.
If you had zip code above city, for example, you’d probably always type the wrong information
in that field.
I’m going to go ahead and click OK and now you can see the list has been changed a little
bit.
If I scroll over to the right you’ll see.
Actually let me make this bigger here.
And there you can see are the fields that we created.
You can see also if you need a field to be wider just grab the border between the two
columns like this and you can change the width of that particular field.
Any time you want to change that you go back to Customize Columns down at the bottom and
you’ll be able to change those.
Right now I’m going to go ahead and click OK and you always have to save you data source,
always.
I’m going to go ahead in Documents and I’m going to call it My Data for now.
And now you’ll see that it’s showing you a list of what they call the mail merge recipients.
So here’s all my fields but we don’t have any data in there yet.
So we’re actually going to put some data in there.
I’m going to make this a little bit bigger and then we’re going to type some data in
here.
What you’ll want to do is go down to the bottom where it says My Data because that’s
showing you the data source.
And when you click Edit then it will let you type in here like this.
There you go.
So I’m just going to put three in here.
I’m going to say Mr. Tom Allen.
And by the way, if they don’t have information, like if Tom didn’t have a company you can
skip right over it.
That’s not going to leave a blank row in your letter you’re creating.
So I’ll go ahead and make Address a little bit bigger because we need some more space
there.
So we’ll say his address is a P.O.
Box and we’re going to say it’s in Charlotte, North Carolina 29589.
And the date we last called, I’m going to go ahead and put an actual date in here.
I will say May 13, 2015.
Now you’ll see when you tab that now you can put in a second one.
I’m going to say this is Arlene Morris and she works for Morris Sokol.
And we’re going to give her an address of 4576 Rivers Avenue.
And we’ll say that she is in New York, New York.
Now you’ll see that I put New York, New York in the same field because I want to show
you in a few minutes if you make mistakes you can always come back in here and change
this.
78563.
And we’ll say December 24, 2015.
And let’s put in one more.
This time I’m not going to have a title.
I’m just going to say this is Horaxce Mills.
He works for Bed & Breakfast, Incorporated.
And his address is 89 Spring Street Springdale, Massachusetts and we’ll say the last time
that we spoke with him was on March 2, 2015.
I’m going to go ahead and click OK and then it takes me back to the Mail Merge Recipients.
I’m just going to click OK past that and now I’m back where I can go to step four
and write the letter.
So it’s actually taken us back now to our main document so we can go ahead and get that
set up.
What I’d like to do now is there is another part to this particular section.
So I want to go ahead and go over to part 2 so we can go ahead and talk about setting
up that main document.
I’ll see you over in the next section.