Print letters

So now that you have the basics of mail merge, let’s try some different options.

First of all you don’t have to use the wizard, if you don’t want to.

Everything that you need to do with mail merge is right here on the MAILINGS tab. Click Start Mail Merge and let’s convert the email messages to letters.

In the document body, all we have to do is delete the hyperlinks.

Also, click Select Recipients and let’s type a new recipient list that has mailing addresses.

Click in any field and start typing.

Press Tab to move to the next column, or Shift+Tab to move back.

When you finish adding information for one recipient, click New Entry to add the next one.

Typing a list can be a lot of work, but keep in mind that you are creating a database that can be used again in other documents and programs, like Microsoft Excel.

We’ll be using this again when we create envelopes in the next movie.

When you have added all the recipients, click OK, and choose where to save the list file, type a name, and click Save.

Now you can click Edit Recipient List anytime, to view and sort the list.

Click the file name in Data Source, and Edit to add or delete entries, and edit the data.

Simply click a field and type.

To delete an entire recipient, click in the column to the left of the entry, and press Delete, and Yes.

When you are finished, click OK and save your updated list.

Finally, let’s add an address block to the top of the letter.

Click ahead of the Greeting Line, press Enter a couple of times, and click the line at the top. Then, click Address Block.

You decide what to include in the address block on the left side, and preview the addresses over here.

First, let’s choose a less-formal name format to match the greeting.

Next, you can decide whether to Insert the company name.

For this letter, Company Name doesn’t apply. Also, our customers are local, so we can choose to Never show the country or region.

This last option modifies the address format according to the country or region.

Again, this option doesn’t apply.

When you are finished setting up the address block, click OK, and the address block field is added to the letter.

Now if you want to see what the actual letters look like instead of the mail merge field code, click Preview Results.

The address itself works fine, but the text would look better without the extra space between the lines.

Select the address block, and go to the PAGE LAYOUT tab.

You can change the formatting of a mail merge field the same as any other text.

The address block tool adds paragraph breaks to each line.

In this document, spacing is added after each paragraph. So let’s enter zero.

Everything looks okay, so go back to the MAILINGS tab and click Finish & Merge.

Even though we chose to create a letter, Word gives us the option to send it as an email, or we could click here and Word would create an individual document file for each recipient.

This could be useful if we wanted to personalize each letter.

But for this letter, let’s go right to the printer.

To print all the letters, click OK, and OK.

Up next, we’ll use mail merge to print the envelopes for the letters.