Mail Merge In Excel Series Of Steps

The process can seem daunting to a beginner, but if you break it down into a series of steps, is very easy to manage.

This list could be a table in Microsoft Word, but most often it is a worksheet in Excel.

In this example, we will use an Excel spreadsheet and a simple letter that has already been created in Word.

There must be only one row of column headers at the top of the table, and each column headers should be unique.

It will save some time later if you use a few standard labels in the column headers, such as, Last Name, Street, City, etc.

I have prepared a very simple table of names and addresses in the file MailMergeRecipients.xlsx.

If you look carefully, you will note that the Postal Code column is set as text, which is why the ZIP codes appear on the left side of the cells.

Unfortunately, this is mandatory: You must set the Postal Code column as text.

Otherwise the leading zeros that are used in certain U.S.

ZIP codes will be truncated off by Excel when it exports it to Microsoft Word.

This problem will occur even if you use the special Zip Code format of Excel.) Close the Excel file and proceed to the next step.

I have prepared a simple letter with the file name MailMergeLetter.docx.

The date near the top is set to update every time we create a new batch of letters, which is a good idea for a Mail Merge letter.

There is a placeholder for the Inside Address and another for the salutation line.

We could also put some information from the recipient list into the body of the letter.

For example, we can add the line, I hope things are going well in X, Where X would be substituted by the recipients city.

But such simple-minded gimmicks impress nobody, and for this example well keep things simple.).

A menu of possibilities appears, and easiest choice is to go to the bottom and employ the Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard.

It defaults to creating a letter, which is exactly what we want.

Click the button at the bottom right-hand corner: Next: Starting document.

Click the Browse button and browse to the Excel spreadsheet that we looked at earlier.

A dialog box should open up, showing all of the rows and columns of our Excel spreadsheet.

To the left of each row there are checkboxes which we can use to manually select who should receive our letter.

Also, note that each of the column headers has a filter button, a drop-down arrow which we could use to select which groups of recipients will receive the letter.

We could also use these filter buttons to sort our letters.

Click OK to close the dialog box, and then click Next: Write your letter.

Delete the text that says Inside Address and leave the mouse pointer on that line.

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