1. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge Creating personalised letters automatically

2. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge Mail Merge: is the process of taking data from one program and inserting it into work created in another. Example: a business needs to send out a letter to 100 people who owe money. They have a list of the people and the amount they owe stored in one program. They create a letter in WORD … then merge the two together to create 100 unique letters… which is much quicker than having to type all 100 letters…

3. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge They have an EXCEL spreadsheet with the name, address and amount owed by each person like this: You will see that some have money outstanding for a number of months!

4. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge They have to tell EXCEL which cells are going to be used in the mail merge. you need the column headings as well as the data!The cells are selected (shaded) using the mouse… you need the column headings as well as the data! In the NAME BOX a name is entered - mergedata in this example – you need to press [ENTER] after you enter the name

5. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge The company gets the outline of the letter typed up so it looks like this:

6. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge But that letter does NOT have all of the details on it … we now have to get the data from the account spreadsheet onto the letter for EVERY person… IN WORD, select TOOLS then MAIL MERGE to get this … Click on [CREATE] and then select FORMLETTERS and [Active Window]

7. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge Now select [GET DATA] and then OPEN DATA SOURCE In this case, the ACCOUNTS data is held in EXCEL so we need to select the correct FILE TYPE as shown below … After you have clicked on the file type, select the file and click on [OPEN]

8. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge You will be asked if you want to use the ENTIRE SPREADSHEET or the named range of cells (mergedata in this example)… select the one you want. Click [OK]. Then click on [EDIT MAIN DOCUMENT] which means you want to work with the document already started.

9. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge In WORD you get the INSERT MERGE FIELDS as shown below… note the FIELDS available are the COLUMN HEADINGS from the spreadsheet…

10. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge Position the cursor and click on the field name to insert in the document…

11. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge You will end up with this! You should save it before going any further… The next step is to perform the merge and create all of the letter…

12. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge TOOLS then MAIL MERGE then select step 3 – [MERGE] and you will see the window shown on the right… You can just click on [MERGE] and WORD creates you a new document based on your letter with all of the data inserted or… You can click on [QUERY OPTIONS] if you want to select certain records only… (example to the right) This shows the field MONTHS_OUTSTANDING being selected. It tells WORD to merge the data ONLY when this is greater than 6

13. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge And you then get FORM LETTERS1 created – it is a document with all of the information in place…

14. Click the mouse to continue Mail Merge You don’t have to merge data just from EXCEL. You can merge from ACCESS. If you decide to merge from ACCESS, you can take data from a TABLE or a QUERY… You INSERT MERGE FIELDS in the same way… Try all of this out!