From the course: Word: Mail Merge in Depth

Start a simple mail merge document - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word: Mail Merge in Depth

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Start a simple mail merge document

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- [Instructor] We're going to get started together on a simple mail merge document. Here's the process in its simplest form. We create our document in Microsoft Word, and even if we're going to email them instead of mailing them, we still started in Word. That Word document is going to have some variable placeholders where we want to put in our customized text for each letter. Let's take this form letter as an example. This is an example of something that will be merged. It will be individualized for each letter. It's Lila's address, and here is a name block. And one more time further down in the letter is Lila's first name to further customize this letter. Word is going to loop through a data source that we're going to give it. And for each row in that data source, it creates a new, individual document for each entry. That data source may be a list of Outlook contacts you have. It could be an Excel spreadsheet of contact names, addresses, birth dates, et cetera. It could be an access table, and we're going to use all of these as options while we go through this course. But to get started, we need just two things. We need a Word document that will be the same for each letter except those variables. And that's what we're looking at right now. And we need our data source. To get started setting up your document for mail merging, you need to change to the mailings tab. From here, click Start Mail Merge. Now, right now you can see that normal Word document is highlighted, meaning this is a normal document. It's not set up for mail merge at all. But we can change that by selecting what type of merge we want to do. And for now, we're going to select letters, the most basic of mail merge. Now it looks like nothing happened, but if I click Start Mail Merge again, this time you'll notice that letters is highlighted. So we're ready to start inserting our merge fields, which we'll be doing later. But for now, if I did want to convert this back to a normal Word document, all I have to do is select normal Word document. For now, I'm going to save this and I'm going to save this as a different name because it's ready to be set up for mail merge. So I'll choose File, Save As, and I can save it anywhere I want to. In this case, I'm going to save it to my PC and I'll browse. I'll save it on the desktop and I'll call it Merge Brochure Letter. I'll click Save, and now it's ready to go as a mail merge document.

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