Creating letters with mail merge

Several people have submitted proposals for sessions at a fictional bicycle advocacy conference. We will create letters to let each person know their proposal was received and is being reviewed.

We will use Microsoft Word's mail merge features to add the recipient's address to the letter. 

Creating the document

To create the letters, we will use a Microsoft Word document that contains a letterhead. Because we will want to use this letterhead for later projects, we will open and then save the document with a new name. 

NOTE: We will use "MM" at the end of the file name to give us a clue that the file is indeed a mail merge document and will have a connection to a data source.

Selecting the data source

Now that the document has been named and saved, we can start the mail merge. We will be working with the Mailings tab on the Microsoft Word ribbon. 

NOTE: Another way to create a mail merge document is to use the Mail Merge Step-by-Step wizard. While it does work, the interface is not as intuitive as using the buttons on the ribbon. 

Now that our document is ready, we can begin to select our data source. This source contains the information we want to use to create our letters: the recipient's name, affiliation, address, and proposal title.

Microsoft Word gives us three options for the data source: use an existing list, type a new list, or choose from Outlook contacts. Our list of potential conference presenters is in an Excel workbook named Applicants.xlsx. 

There is no obvious change to our document, but the source file is now ready to be merged with our letters. 

Inserting the address merge fields

Now that our document and our data source are connected, we can begin inserting the merge fields. We will begin by creating an inside address for our letter. The inside address should be in the upper left corner of the document below the letterhead. We need to correctly place the cursor in the blank document. 

With the recipient's name inserted, we need to move to the next line of the address. If we simply press the Enter key, there will be too much space between the lines. To keep the address single-spaced, we can insert a soft return. This is accomplished by holding down the Shift key while pressing the Enter key. 

Now that the first three lines are complete, let's add the remaining fields to the address. Because the city, state, and zip code fields are all on the same line, we will need to add spaces and a comma between the merge fields.

The merge fields for the inside address look like this: 

Adding the greeting line

The next part of the letter is the greeting line. Microsoft Word has a built-in tool that makes it simple to insert this text. Before we begin, we need to place the cursor below the inside address.

The Insert Greeting Line dialog box opens: 

In this dialog box, we can modify the format of a greeting and see a preview of what the greeting line will look like. By default, Word starts the greeting with the word "Dear" followed by the recipient's first name, last name, and a comma.

The "Greeting line for invalid recipient names" drop-down shows us what would happen if one or more of our recipients' records did not have first or last names. Luckily, our database is thorough, so we won't need to worry about this. However, to prevent gendered presumptions for possible future entries, let's change this option to None.

The merge fields in the document now look like this: 

Previewing the mail merge results

Before we continue working on the letter, let's take a moment to preview what we've done up to this point. By previewing the inside address and greeting line, we can find, and fix, errors in spacing and punctuation that we may have missed when looking at the merge fields. 

The document changes and now shows us the address and greeting line for our first recipient, Diane Dell.

We can use the Preview Results tools to move through the other letters, find a specific recipient, or check for errors.

Adding content to the letter

Now that the inside address and greeting line are correct, we can begin adding content to our letter. We want to let people know that their proposal was received and will be reviewed. This content will be a combination of text we type manually and a merge field from the source document. 

The letter looks like this: 

Completing the mail merge

At this point, the letters look complete. However, we are still previewing the finished document. We have not completed the merge. When the mail merge is complete, we will have individual letters for each recipient. 

There are several choices for how to complete the merge. We can choose to edit the individual documents. Doing this will produce a Word document that will have a letter for each recipient. We could choose to print the documents which will send the documents directly to the printer. Or we can email the documents. Let's choose to edit the individual documents. 

The Merge to New Document dialog box opens:

This dialog box gives us the options to merge all of the records, the current records, or other specific records.

A new Microsoft Word document named Letters1 opens. This document contains twenty letters, one for each of our recipients. At this point, we could edit individual letters, print the letters, or simply save the document to return to at a later time. 

The merged letters have been saved.