Mail Merge Course
By Robert Stetson
Mail Merge Course
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2010 By Robert Stetson
CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS MAIL MERGE?
Mail Merge is more than a program to mass mail letters. It can be used for a variety of purposes only limited by your imagination. The arduous task of sending out wedding invitations or Christmas cards can be made easy and automatic when you use Mail Merge.
For the task of sending out resumes with cover letters, it’s ideal. Also, the mailing of query letters along with a book or article synopsis to prospective agents can give the varying synopsis content requirements just the twist needed to personalize them.
Trying to use Mail Merge for the first time can be frustrating at best. The tutorials are cluttered with alternate scenarios and crammed with detailed variations. Yet for all the intricate detail, it’s never quite clear how to actually get the list of names and addresses onto the actual printed pages.
This tutorial leads you step by step through the process of getting Mail Merge to do the job, from creating the list to writing the document, to printing out pages and envelopes automatically.
Once you can make it work, then you can more easily learn new ways of using different formats. This is not a reference for people who already know how to use Mail Merge. This is a tutorial for people who are mystified by the process and don’t know where to begin.
Let’s go forward and make a working Mail Merge letter and mailing list step by step without a lot of alternate scenarios along the way. Also, the information needed to place each data element is clearly defined.
When I first read about using Mail Merge the tutorial took it for granted that I understood certain basic facts that were omitted from the explanation, such as exactly how do you format the mailing list information for the letter? How do you target the locations and control which elements of the data go where?
We’re not going to blow your mind with talk about alternate delimiters and differing data scenarios, multitudes of ways to configure your source data or any of the things that tell you everything you never wanted to know about expanding your knowledge of Mail Merge in the workplace.
Let’s go forward starting with a letter intended to be mailed out to three people. Whether it’s three or three hundred or three thousand makes no difference, so let’s keep it very small.
CHAPTER 2 THE MAILING LIST
We’re going to use Excel as a basis for our Mailing List because it’s the simplest way to separate the data elements for each document to be mailed. What are data elements? They are the pieces of information to be inserted in each letter, one by one. Each row in the Excel worksheet is the information needed for each letter and envelope in the mailing.
Creating this document is quick and easy. If you have 500 names to enter, it’s probably a pain in the neck to do by hand, but no harder than doing the mailing is without Mail Merge. The difference is you only have to do this once. The entire mailing list is shown in the screen shot above.
Here is exactly how you have to set it up. In the zoom shot below notice the top row (#1) are header names for the columns. Mail Merge will assume these are there, so if you don’t put these headers in this exact place, you will lose the first row of your mailing.
This (above) is the Excel spreadsheet with my headers in the first row across the top of the form. You need not worry about the width of the sheet because we never actually print out the actual spreadsheet; we just select fields and copy the content when merging with the mailing document.
As for the content, notice we start with the title. This column will have the titles such as, Mr., Miss, Mrs., Dr, etc. Nothing is less personal than calling a woman Mister. The observance of their title is important to personalizing your mail.
You’re going to see some strange characters surrounding the mailing list words from the Excel document in this CHAPTER that you want to insert in the letter. Characters like “<<” and “>>”. Don’t worry about those for now. We’re using these characters to
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Texte: Robert Stetson
Bildmaterialien: Robert Stetson
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 13.01.2014
ISBN: 978-3-7309-7563-3
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