How to use Mail Merge

Need a way to connect data from your Outlook contacts or a mailing list to a letter that needs to be customized for each recipient? Mail merge is the answer.

Mail merge is a powerful feature in Microsoft Word that gives you the ability to print letters/envelopes and create emails that are addressed to a list of contacts. Each letter or email will be specifically addressed to the contact. This saves a lot of time because you don’t have to modify the document for each contact.

A few things to check before you start Mail Merge:

You must have Microsoft Word and Outlook both installed, and both from the same version. This means that if you have Word 2003 and Outlook 2007, Mail Merge will not work.
Word should be set as the email editor. I’ve dealt with situations where Mail Merge didn’t work because this was not set up.

The Process:

In this post, we will talk about sending emails to a list of contacts. The list is in an Excel document that contains Name, Physical Address, and Email address info for each contact. We’re using Microsft Office 2007 in this example.

Step 1: To make sure Mail Merge will work correctly, I’d suggest to having Outlook open, then start Word. Browse to the “Mailings” tab and select “Start Mail Merge”. We will be using the Wizard as it makes things much easier (see below).

Step 2: Select the format of your document. In this case, we will be sending email messages. Click “Next” on the bottom right corner.

Step 3: You can leave this open as “Use the current document” or use a pre-existing one. You can also start typing the body of the email you will be sending to your contacts. Click “Next” when done.

Step 4: Here we will be using the Excel file that contains the contacts list (you could also use Outlook contacts). When using a list, browse to the file and upload it. Click “Next”.

In this step, you will be entering the corresponding fields to the contact’s name and any other info you want to show up on your email. Remember that if the Excel file doesn’t contain any info for a specific field, it will show blank in the email, so make sure you update the list before starting Mail Merge. Use “More Items” to look up the name of the field from Excel and add it to the Word document.

Step 5- Preview your email messages, you can go through each one of them to make sure it is displaying the correct info.

Step 6- To complete the merge, click on Electronic Mail and this will display a window where you can select the field that contains the contact’s email address. Once you click OK, the emails will start flying.

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