The text editor par excellence at the moment and for many years, is Microsoft‘s Word, the program that is included in the Office suite. It is full of functions of all kinds that greatly facilitate our daily work with the program. Now we are going to focus on the utility to combine mail from Word , without third-party applications.
How could it be otherwise, the vast majority of the functions that this office program presents to us are focused on optimizing the work of its users. This is something that is especially important in this case, especially if we bear in mind that it is one of the most used applications in the world. Thus, one of Microsoft’s main goals with Word is for its millions of users to be as productive as possible.
What’s more, this same objective can also be extrapolated to other sister solutions such as Excel or PowerPoint, among others. And is that something that we must take into account at this point, is that Word is not a simple editor or creator of text documents. From here we can carry out many other tasks related to the world of office automation, as we will see. To all this we can add the amount of additional objects that we can deal with today from the software . We talk about objects such as photos, videos, links, tables, WordArt , graphics, etc.
What is the Mail Merge feature in Word
With everything and with this, in these same lines we want to focus on a somewhat specific type of data processing. In particular we refer to a function that is commonly called a mail merge or mail merge. Well, to start with all this we will tell you that this is something that will allow us to save an enormous amount of time and effort. At the same time it is worth noting that it will be of great help to us both in professional and more domestic environments. All of this can be found in the Correspondence menu option in the main Word interface .
We say this because this is a feature of this software that will help us both at home or at work. It may be the case that we need to send personal invitations to an event to family and friends , or a business letter from work. The main usefulness of this that we are commenting on is that, in most cases similar to those mentioned, it is likely that we will have to send the same document to many people.
Of course, where appropriate, where we lose more time, once we have written the original document, is by personalizing the greeting or address of each recipient. Surely this we have had to suffer on several occasions.
How the mail merge works
But for the future, we recommend using Word’s Mail Merge feature to save a lot of time. This is actually achieved because with this mail merge option included in the program, Word fills in a lot of data automatically, so that we can focus on the content of the original message and suitable for all recipients.
And it is that at this point we must bear in mind that while the recipients may vary, there are fields that must be personalized. As a general rule, these are usually the address field and the header, that is, the initial greeting. But we can find other types of data that we must adapt such as customer numbers or any other personal information .
Extract recipients for mail merge
Well, as we mentioned before, for this that we tell you the first thing we do is write the original and common document for all. Next, from the same program interface, we have to go to the menu called Correspondence. At this point, it is worth noting that the text editor allows us to consult different sources to obtain the necessary information.
For example, we can use our Outlook contacts, or import tables that we already have created in Excel. In addition, and how could it be otherwise, we can also enter the information related to the recipients, directly by hand in Word. We achieve all this through the menu option Correspondence / Select recipients.
Of course, in the case that we use an Excel file, we must organize the data correctly in a table and add titles to the column. This is because Word extracts the information directly from that file. But it can also be the case that we want to enter the data directly by hand. To do this, we select the option Write a new list so that the program presents us with the columns where we can enter the corresponding information.
Of course, here we have the possibility of modifying the name of those data columns, eliminating those that are not necessary, or adding others. Everything will depend to a great extent on the amount of data that we want to modify and personalize in each original document that is the basis. Once all the data has been entered, Word suggests that we save the new database so that we can use it in the future.
How to mail merge in Word
Now we already have both the original text document that will serve as the base, as well as the database with the contacts to which this one that we selected or created before is directed. A very important thing in Word merged correspondence is the Address Block button. This shows us a window to determine the structure of the addresses from the table created or selected previously.
The so-called Greeting Line through which we can integrate a fully personalized greeting into the document will also be very useful.
Likewise, to fill in and customize the rest of the fields that could be part of our original document, we recommend that you take a look at Insert Combined Field.
Here we can add custom data corresponding to various categories in the data table that we created in the beginning.