Mail Merge Course

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