Okay we’re still in module 12 and we’re talking about mail merges in this module.
We’re all the way down to section 3 where I want to show you how to merge a document
with an existing data source.
Earlier when we created our own main document we merged it with a data source that we created
in Word because we didn’t have one already.
So now I want to show you how to find one that’s a file in your computer somewhere
and actually pull that in.
I’ve opened up my main document and you can see that this file is very similar to
the one we created over in section 2 when we created our own main document.
But what I’d like to do now is I’m going to go ahead and go to the Mailings tab and
start the mail merge and I’ll go back to the wizard.
What I wanted you to notice this time is it automatically put me on step three because
it doesn’t need to know steps one and two since I had an existing document I went ahead
and opened.
What you’ll see here is the last file that was merged into this main document will be
listed here.
And if you want to change it you select a different list.
Now before I do this I wanted to flip over and show you that what I want to do this time
is merge an Excel file and pull that data into this main document.
So let me flip over to the Excel file and just show it to you real quick.
Here’s the Excel file and I want you to notice that I have a header row at the top.
These headers have to correspond with the actual field names over in Word.
If it sees that first name is actually F Name over in the main document then it won’t
know they’re a match and you’ll have to do some manual matching.
So it’s best to have the field names here match the field names in Word and then you
don’t have a problem.
But you can see I just have all the data below each of the columns here and that’s really
all it is.
And this is all over on Sheet 1 here.
You can merge this data whether the file is open or not.
I just opened it to show you what it looks like.
So let me flip back to Word.
If I did want to select a different list as it’s called over here I click on Select
a Different List and you navigate and find your new data file and now you’ll see that
it asks you since this one’s coming from Excel it’s asking me which sheet in the
Excel file do you want to pull from.
I’m going to click OK because there’s only one sheet there.
And now what you’ll notice is that it’s showing me all of my mail merge recipients.
So I’ll just click OK here and now let’s go ahead and go to the next step where it
says Write Your Letter.
Now we don’t have to do that because ours is already written.
So I’ll go ahead and click Next again and here’s where I can preview my letters.
So I can go through the recipients one at a time this way.
Again if I wanted to change the letter itself I’m going to click on Preview Results and
I can change the letter and then turn it back on.
And if I need to change the data I’m going to go to the Edit Recipient List over here.
But I’m going to go ahead and click Next and complete the merge.
And then you would go ahead and say Edit the Individual Letters like we did before and
it would do the mail merge for you.
So pretty easy to actually pull in external data.
What I want to do now is talk to you a little bit about when you’re merging this data
how you can actually do some sorting and filtering as you’re having it do the merge.