1. 1 CA201 Word Application Creating Form Letters and Labels Week # 11 By Tariq Ibn Aziz Dammam Community college

2. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 2 Objectives In this chapter you will learn to: –Understand mail merge. –Prepare the variable data. –Prepare the form letter. –Merge the data with the form letter. –Create and print labels.

3. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 3 Mail Merge If you want to send a letter to everyone on a customer list to advertise the products. The easiest way to generate a set of documents that are identical except for certain information—such as the name, address, and greeting of a letter—is to use a process called mail merge.

4. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 4 Understanding Mail Merge Mail merge involves taking information from one document—the data source—and combining it with another document—the main document. The data source is a document, spreadsheet, database, or other type of file that contains the variable information (such as names, addresses, and phone numbers) The main document is sometimes referred to as a form document

5. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 5 Preparing the Variable Data Before you can merge documents, you need to either specify an existing data source or create one. The data source consists columns called fields and rows called records. Because the field names are also used as the merge fields in the main document, they cannot contain spaces—for example, FirstName is an acceptable field name, but First Name is not.

6. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 6 Preparing the Variable Data

7. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 7 Outlook Contacts List as a Data Source You can use Outlook contacts list as the data source for the merge process in the Mail Merge Wizard.

8. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 8 Preparing the Form Letter The most common type of main document used in the mail merge process is the form letter. This type of document typically contains merge fields for the name and address of each recipient along with text that is the same in all the letters. Each merge field corresponds to a piece of information in the data source. It appears in the main document with guillemot characters (« and ») around it.

9. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 9 Merging the Data with the Form Letter After you set up a data source and enter merge fields into a main document, you are ready to merge them to create one merged document for each data source record used. These merged documents are either sent directly to the printer or they are merged one after the other into a new document, separated by page breaks. The length of the new document depends on the length of the main document and the number of records being used from the data source.

10. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 10 Creating and Printing Labels You can use a data source with more than one kind of main document. For example, the same data source you use to print form letters can be used to print sheets of mailing labels or to print envelopes.

11. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 11 Chapter Key Points You can use the Mail Merge Wizard to merge a data source, such as a database or contact list, and a main document, such as a form letter or labels. The information in a data source is organized into records You can use a list from another program, such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft, Excel, Microsoft Visual FoxPro, or the contact list from Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Outlook Express. You can sort the information in a data source. You can also filter the data

12. Tariq Aziz, Dammam Community College 12 Chapter Key Points You can create a main document in two ways: –by using an existing document and inserting merge fields into it –by creating a new main document as you work through the mail merge process You can review merged data and add a merge field to personalize a sentence in the body of a main document. You can use a data source to create mailing labels or envelopes to use with your mailing. After you merge the data source and the main document to create labels, you can print them on standard paper to proofread them or on sheets of adhesive labels.