Mail Merging (ECDL)

The purpose of mail merging is to make your life easier without having to change the address and other
contents of a ‘master’ letter which is to be sent to many destinations.

The mail merge relates a word document to a data source.

The data source may be in many forms such as a table in a Word document or a database.

We will concentrate on a Table in Word for this example.

Create a new Word document and save as NAME DATA.

You will now create a table which will act as the data source for a letter you have created.

 Click ‘Table’ on the toolbar then ‘Insert Table’ from the drop down menu.
Choose 4 columns and 5 rows (as below) and enter the information as detailed
(Tab to next column).

Name Address 1 Address 2 Post Code

James Brown 13 Cherry Road Whitley Bay NE25 6DB
Marvin Gaye 21 Shades Drive Washington NE28 4RF
Stephen Wonder 42 Sunny Street Sunderland SR1 5TY
Curtis Mayfield 16 North Avenue Newcastle NE24 8YH

Notice the titles on the first row of the Table (when creating a Table remember to allow for this row
when stating the number of rows required).

Save the document and Close!

 Open a current letter or create one and save as NAME LETTER.

Click ‘Tools’ and then ‘Mail Merge’ from the drop down menu.
Click ‘Create’ then ‘Form Letters’ from the drop down menu.
Click ‘Active Window’ (the document you are wishing to place the data in).

Now you are going to state which document is to be referred to for the data.

Click ‘Get Data’ then ‘Open data source’ from the drop down menu.
Double click on the NAMEDATA File you created as the data source.
Click ‘Edit Main Document’.

A mail merge tool bar appears below your current toolbars.

Click where you wish the data to appear within the letter.
Click ‘Insert Merge Field’ on the Mail Merge Toolbar and select the field that you wish to
appear. Repeat this until you are happy that all relevant data is merged to the letter.

 To ensure that what you have done is correct click the ‘View Merged Data’ icon adjacent to
‘Insert Word Field’ and the data will appear within the letter as per the table . Click through the
records via the next and previous record icons.

Save the merged letter.

It is also possible to convert text which is broken by commas ( i.e john, james, michelle, paige ) into a
Table to act as a data source.
Select all the text that is to appear within the table, titles included.

©Chris Steele 2001

Click ‘Table’ and ‘Convert text to table’ from the drop down menu. Ensure the number of columns
and rows are correct and click OK. The table is made for you.

©Chris Steele 2001