1. Mail Merge

2. One very useful feature of Microsoft Office is the Mail Merge feature. As an example of its use, suppose you want to send out application letters for a job, and you want to send them to many companies, but have them customized for each recipient.

3. In particular, suppose you have created the following form letter in Word:

5. But this is really just a template that you’d like to be able to customize for each company you’re sending this to. Suppose further that you have the contact information for the companies you’re applying to in a table in an Access database:

7. To create the customized form letters you want, you can either start from Access or from Word, with the corresponding Access table or Word document open.

8. In Access, do Tools => Office Links => Merge It with MS Word. In Word, do Tools => Mail Merge …

9. The first thing you need to do is modify the Word document (called the main document) to tell it where the field values from the Access table records go. (The Access table is called the data source.) To do this, use the Insert Merge Field on the Mail Merge toolbar for each such place in the document. The result looks like this:

10. Mail Merge Toolbar

11. The field names that are to be used from each record in the table are displayed between double angle brackets. To see what actually gets inserted, record by record, click the > button. Here is what the letter looks like when the first record is used:

13. Use the arrow keys on the toolbar to see what the corresponding result is like for each record in the table. When you are satisfied all the letters, you can then use the Merge… button to either send all the letters to the printer or create a single Word document containing all the letters.

15. Notes Mail Merge can also use a Word table rather than an Access table as the data source. Mail Merge can also use an Access query rather than a table. This is clearly more useful if, for example, you only want to send letters to some of the companies in your database, or if the data you want to merge comes from multiple tables in your database.