Using the Mail Merge Wizard in Word 2010

Mail merge can be used in various correspondences, be it in business or personal letters. For instance, you need to send a standard letter to a large number of clients, or perhaps you want to send a Christmas greeting to your family and friends. The purpose of mail merge is for creating a set of documents that are essentially the same, only where in certain parts of each document contains unique elements. For whatever purpose you will use this feature, the general approach is the same. In this article, we are going to utilize the step by step method which is the Mail Merge Wizard.

Prepare data for Mail Merge

The data for mail merge can be prepared in several ways, but an example of a data is prepared in simple tabular form on an Excel spreadsheet. In our data below, we have the names of the recipients and their addresses. We can also put the salutation for each person.

Mail Merge Wizard

Now that we have our data, let us access the Mail Merge Wizard in Word 2010. Go to the Mailings tab, click on the Start Mail Merge button. This particular button presents us with a number of options, but we are going to focus on the one found at the bottom which is the Step By Step Mail Merge Wizard; this will give us an overall idea of how mail merge works.

We currently have a blank document and on the right appears the Mail Merge Task Pane. The wizard will take us through the steps of a mail merge.
Step 1: First, we choose the kind of document we are going to create. Let us start with creating a Letter. Click on Next: Starting document.

Step 2: Next is we are asked how we want to setup our letter. For this example, let us choose Start from a template. Click on Select template which brings up a dialog. Let us go for Urban Letter which is found in the Letters tab; you may choose other templates as appropriate. The template is loaded to our previously blank document. Click on Next: Select recipients.

Step 3: Now we are going to select the recipients of the letter. Since we have prepared our data, we are going to Use an existing list. Click on Browse, look for the spreadsheet, and click on Open.

If our spreadsheet contains multiple sheets, a dialog comes up asking us to select the sheet that has our data. Then the Mail Merge Recipients dialog comes up confirming if we have the correct data. Click on OK.

Step 4: We are now going to write our letter. Delete the contents of the template where it says type recipient’s name and address, and replace it with the Address Block that Word has prepared for us.

The Insert Address Block dialog gives us a Preview of how one of our recipient’s name and address will appear in our letter. We can also change the format of the recipient’s name here. Click OK.

Same thing for the salutation; delete the contents of the template where it says type the salutation. Click on Greeting line from the Mail Merge Task Pane.

On the Insert Greeting Line dialog, we also have the option to change the format of the salutation and we get a preview of how it will look on our letter. If satisfied, click on OK.

Step 5: We are now ready to preview our letters. On the Mail Merge Task Pane, there is a pair of controls to step us through the letters. We also have the options to Edit recipient list and Exclude a recipient. Click on Next: Complete the merge for the final step.

Step 6: Lastly, we complete the merge by either selecting Print which will print all of the letters or by selecting Edit the individual letters should we need to make any changes on the letter for a particular person.

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!