How to do a Mail Merge in Microsoft Word 2013 – Part 2

Microsoft Word allows users to execute the Mail Merge function through a Mail Merge Wizard. Picking up from the previous video, the final two steps in the wizard process are Previewing and Completing the Merge. The wizard contains numerous templates for step 2 of the wizard process, which are available both locally and online via Outlook.com; these templates are categorized for the user’s benefit, and involve specific Form Fields. As an alternative to the wizard, Word contains manual commands for the Mail Merge, such as Select Recipients, Edit Recipient List, and Insert Merge Field.

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Video transcripts:

Welcome back to mail merge in our course on Word 2013. In the previous section, we prepared a mail merge and we got right through to the point where we’re previewing the letters. This is the first of the five mail merge letters. And in this section, we’re going to look at how we finish off the mail merge, actually execute the mail merge, and then we’re going to look at two or three of the specific additional points, variations, and special cases that I mentioned in the first section. And the first thing we’re going to do now is to save the letter that we’ve used in case we have to come back and do some more work on it later and also to use it as a kind of model for future mail merge letters.

So I’m going to save it as. I’m going to go into Computer, into the Example Files, and I’m going to save it as example-16. And in fact if you look in the list of files that came with this course that is example-16. Now having saved it, the name of course appears at the top. Let’s get back to this previewing.

Now when it comes to previewing letters, it’s pretty straightforward case of just stepping through them. So we’ve got controls here on the right. Note also and particularly this is true when you get towards the end of a mail merge, almost all of the commands in the groups on the Mailings Tab are now available and you can use those, for instance to step through recipients. Let’s go to recipient 2, just click on the right arrow there, Mr. Peter Stanley, Dear Pete, that’s fine. Dr. Emelia Sanchez, Dear Dr. Sanchez, yeah that’s fine. You may want to step through them all individually. You may think that a particular recipient may have caused a problem and you’ve got a Find a recipient option there. You can look for a particular person in the list. You can also if you see a particular letter and think, ah, I didn’t mean to send them that or that’s really gone completely wrong. You can click on Exclude this recipient to remove one of the recipients from the list. So this really is your opportunity to fine tune the list and also, of course, you may see an error in the letter that means you’ve got to go back and edit the letter and go through some of the earlier processes again. But I’m going to assume here for the moment that everything else has gone okay and I’m going to go down to Next, Complete the merge.

Now this last step is also one that sometimes causes a little bit of confusion, so let me explain this in a little bit of detail. The mail merge hasn’t actually happened yet but we’re pretty much ready for it and there are really two options. Now if you click on Print which basically says Merge to printer, what will happen is it will, by default, just print all of the letters; so it merges them all to the printer, prints them all. You can if you want just merge the current record or you could select a range and given that we’ve got five letters, I could say one to four or three to five or something like that. So that’s the basic way of printing the letters.

If on the other hand you want to look at the individual letters after the merge, this is where you use the second option, Edit individual letters, and again you can do all the current record or a range. So why would you want to do this? Well, let’s suppose that you’re completely happy with the basic letter that you’ve done and you’ve generated in my case five letters or maybe 500 or 5,000, but you want to be able to go through and find two or three individual people where you want to maybe add a little extra note; you want to write something different to them. Now, of course, we could’ve excluded them from the recipient list and written them a separate letter, but this is a good alternative. It means you can go through and maybe add something or even remove something from individual letters. When you’ve finished processing one or more individual letters, you can then just print the whole lot because they’re all contained in one document with a whole load of letters in it. So that’s basically how you complete the mail merge.

And when you’ve done your print or you’ve created that file that you’re going to go away and edit to do a bit of individual editing and customizing of letters, all you need to do is to close the Mail Merge Wizard and it’s done. You can then close the file we’ve been working on, click on Save, and we’re all done.

So having successfully completed one mail merge, let’s have a look at some of the options related to mail merge, including one or two of the things that I mentioned earlier on. I’ve started the Mail Merge Wizard again and this time I’m going to go into Step 2 from Step 1. One of the question there, How do you want to setup your letters? Use the current document. That’s what we did last time. We typed in the content and then later on put in the merge fields, but what about start from a template? Now if you want to start from a template, there are a number of templates available with Word 2013 and many of those are mail merge templates.

So let’s take a quick look at how we would do that. First of all, click on Select Template. Now Select Template gives access to templates that are available locally on the device. We’re going to look at templates on Office.com. So I’m going to press this button down here, Templates on Office.com. Now when you do this, you may not quite see the same as this because Microsoft.com does change quite a bit. The pages are replaced and refreshed on a fairly regular basis. But when you get into the area of Office Templates, you need to go to Word, so I click on Word first, and then I also have a Search box, Search for Word Templates. What I’m going to do is to search for mail merge templates. So I type in Mail Merge, hit the magnifier, and it comes up with a number of mail merge letter templates. There are quite a few of these templates. You can see on the left quite a long list of them: Letters, Print, Stationary. Let’s stick with a letter. Let’s go for this particular letter, the Equity theme letter. And we can see the rating. Click on download. I have quite a lot of security on the internet here so I have to allow pop-up blocker. You may have a similar thing on your device. So we’ll just give it a time to get past that, to actually download again for some reason, but eventually I will get that letter. So there we are. I go into Mailings and I’ve got my document. I could actually go through now, same procedure that we used before and setup my mail merge.

Now on this particular letter has got a couple of interesting things about it. First of all, I’m just I’m just going to zoom in on this part of the letter. The items in the letter that are between the double angle brackets are basically the merge fields. So what you have here, Greeting line, that will be a merge field. And when you want to setup your data you would need a data item whose name was Greeting line. Address block would pretty much work the same way that address block worked in the previous example, in the last section. The items that are between square brackets are what are called Form Fields. We’ve seen these before. I’ve referred to them as form fields or placeholders. But the difference between them is that these form fields are effectively the things that you are going to enter as a fixed part of your letter. So for instance, I might put today’s date in here and that’s it for this letter. It’s effectively then a fixed part of data in this letter. It is not one of the merge fields. Similarly, if I wanted to put the company name in here that again is a fixed part of the letter. And I can put my sender address there as well. Similarly towards the bottom of the letter I’ve got other fields to fill in. Notice that when I filled in Acme Engineering Inc. as a form field, it appeared at the bottom as well. So if you’re using one of these templates letters, you’d need to fill in those form fields yourself and then what remains, the merge fields, the one in the angle brackets are the ones that you’ll setup in the merge. So let’s see how we could set about merging with this particular template.

Well, I’ve setup my document. I filled in all those form fields. I’ve got the merge fields left, just those two sets of merge fields. I don’t really need to use the Wizard now. I’m going to go to the Select Recipients button first and it says, Type a new list, Use an existing list, or Choose from Outlook Contacts. I’m going to use an existing list and what I’m going to do is use the list that we created in the last section and just to help you, there it is, Demo 1.mdb, but I’ve also put the list that we created earlier into the standard folder for the example files and it’s included with the files you got in the course. It’s example-16.mdb. So double click or open that one. So let’s just confirm that. Go into Edit recipient list. There’s the list of people. Don’t worry too much if the order has changed or the order of the fields has changed, Word 2013 does certain things to these lists itself. You can change the sort order anyway if you want to. But there’s the list. If you didn’t want to use all of these people, you could use the check boxes here to eliminate some of the recipients from the current mail merge. But there are the mail merge recipients. The only real issue I’m going to have here, as you may have guessed, is that when I created this list, I called the field here Salutation rather than Greeting line. A couple of ways around that; I could either create a new field and copy these values into it, but I could just change the merge field in the document and that’s going to be the easiest way to do it. So I’m happy with the recipient list. I’m going to select the Greeting line. I’m going to press the Delete key and then I’m going to insert a new field. Note up here that I’ve got a command button, Insert Merge Field. The one I’m going to put in is Salutation. I may choose, for instance, to make that bold. So I can make that bold, and now let me just preview the result. So click on preview results, and there we have the first merge done. It’s to Jane Doe. I can review all of that letter. I could perhaps just zoom out a little, see a little more of it, scroll down, see the closing part, and then I can step through the recipients, check each of those, and all of the finishing merge options like printing, merging to a file, and so on, all of that is still available to me.

So in that second example we’ve pretty much done everything manually and this leads us to the next exercise for you to do because I would like you to use that same letter template. It doesn’t really matter if you want to use a different letter, but you’ve seen that one now and you have some idea of what goes where. You can either use example-16.mdb in the file with those five people in it or better still create your own recipient list, and I’d like you to do a mail merge with that letter and at least five recipients. My version of the saved output of that mail merge is example-17. When you open example-17, you’ll see that it’s got five full letters in it and you’re equivalent output, depending on what letter you choose, what recipient list you choose, and so on should have at least five pages of output as well.

Okay that’s it on mail merge. I’ll see you in the next section.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!