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Creating form letters for pleasure and profit
Time to send out holiday greetings, the club newsletter, or party invitations? Form letters, mailing labels, envelopes—mail merge is one of those great features that seem to make computers worthwhile. Who wants to spend all that time handwriting envelopes?
But let’s face it, mail merge can be tricky. There's a lot going on and a lot you need to coordinate. So we're going to make it easy. First, let’s review what you need to get started.
Get smart
First of all, let’s review a little terminology that will make the process easier to understand.
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Data source The place you use to keep your names and addresses. No, not a napkin or a crumpled receipt, but typically one of the following:
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Works Contacts — highly recommended
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A Works database
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A Microsoft® Office Excel spreadsheet
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A comma or tab-delimited text file (this is a great way of sharing information between programs — more on this later.)
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Make sure that your data source contains all the names and addresses you need, and that address information is complete for all your intended recipients.
Document We tend to think of documents as things like letters. But from a mail merge point of view, envelopes and labels are documents too.
Merge document When you’ve added names and addresses to a document, you create a merge document. This is a big document that contains a separate letter, envelope, or label for each name you've selected from your data source.
Field Fields are placeholders that you insert into the main document at locations where you want unique information to appear. Fields appear in your document within chevrons, for example, «AddressBlock». When you merge your document, the field is replaced with the specific information from your data source.
Get help!
There’s a lot of Help available on mail merge, if you know where to look.
The Help fileIf you can’t see Help, just press F1 (next to the Esc key, on the top left of your keyboard) to display it. |
In the Works Word Processor, search for mail merge.
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If you're using Office Word in Works Suite 2006, on the Tools menu, point to Address Book Mail Merge, and then click Mail Merge Step by Step. For previous versions of Works Suite, use the Answer Wizard to search for Works Suite mail merge. The best topics for your query have Works Suite in their title.
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Double-check your data source
Open your data source and do a quick check. Are all the names you want there? Are all addresses present and complete?
Note: If you’re using a spreadsheet or database, be sure to note the name of the worksheet or table that contains your data, as you'll need to specify this later. Also, check to see if the first row of a spreadsheet contains field names – for example, First Name, Last Name, City, or ZIP, rather than addresses as you will need to exclude the first row if it does not contain addresses.
Create your main document
You can use one of the Works templates – for example, a letter template – or just create one from scratch.
Be sure to include your own return address in this letter. It's one of the pieces of information that will be common to every letter, so it is not part of the mail merge process.
Get started
What are you waiting for?
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