Link to screencast-performing a mail merge

Description - I created this tutorial because at my current job I am required to send surveys to participants for whom we do not have email addresses. Mail merges are helpful because they allow me to complete a task that could be very time consuming in less time. They can also be used by teachers when sharing newsletters with parents. Adding personalization is beneficial to fostering a sense of community.

This is the link to my video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMYhVXLcCtQ

Written transcript

This tutorial will provide you with step by step directions on how to create a mail merge. For this specific exercise we will complete the mail merge to send letters of request to fifteen different individual and instead of having to type all their information on each individual letter we can create an excel spreadsheet with the names and addresses of these fifteen individuals. This will also allow you to print your mailing labels. You will also need a word document with the letter that we’re going to send. So that is the letter of request document you see here. And once we have these two documents ready we can get started with the process of the mail merge. Let’s begin by opening the word document first; and this dialog box will come up and this is just asking you for kind of permission to link the information on the database to this letter so I am just going to say yes. Once you open the letter you can see that there is really no personalization whatsoever but we are going to change that very easily and very quickly. I am just going to move my cursor one line below the date and I am going to select the “mailings” tab and I am going to go to where it says select recipients. If you click on it you have different options but this time I am going to use “use existing list” because I already have a list ready with all the information that I need and so I am going to go look for that file on my desktop which is where I placed it for ease of access and so it’s right here, it’s called addresses, I will double click on it and another dialog box opens and I am going to use the information on sheet 1 and you always want this box to be checked because we do have column headers. And then just simply say OK. And again there’s really no change just yet. But if you go to where it says “insert merge field” and select the drop down menu you see the different headers that we have on the columns so we are going to use these for the letter. I am going to start by inserting the “first name” add a space and then add the person’s “last name”. I will go to the next line and add the ”title” of the person and on the next line we are going to add the “organization” where that person works; on the next line I will add the “address” field, followed by the “city”, “state” and “zip code”. So that completes the heading part of the letter. And I still want to personalize it even more so I am going to go here where it says “Dear” and include a “salutation” first, a space and then person’s “last name” followed by a comma. So now you can see that you have all the merge fields integrated into the letter and once you do that you can go to “finish and merge” and you want to edit individual documents, click on that and you want to merge all the records and say OK. You can see that it creates a new word document but this document now has all the letters. So there is a letter for Mr. Jones and if you scroll down your screen you will notice that you have your letter for Ms. Smith and so on and so forth; you have fifteen different letters that you can easily go print on your letterhead so they’re all there-all fifteen of them-and that makes it very simple to complete a mail merge. If you have 200, 300 even more documents that you need to send out this will be a very effective tool to address those needs. I hope this tutorial has been helpful to you. Thank you.