You don't often hear tell of the urge to…mail merge. And that's a shame, because this powerful tool lets you easily and automatically create any number of letters that look personalized, documents with information relevant to each recipient, and even documents without recipients that have consistent elements. All you need is a boilerplate document that has fields—areas containing commands that replace themselves with information they pull from a database—and a database (or a simple spreadsheet as in the example that follows). It's really quite cool, and I'm often surprised at how many people have no idea it exists.

To get to the cool, you do need to begin with a bit of organization. What kind of document are you sending? What are the variables? The obvious application for mail merge is sending multiple documents where only the names and addresses vary, but the more information that differs from message to message, the more mail merge makes sense. In this how-to, we look at sending mail-merged paper documents and e-mail. Performing mail merges is more about understanding the theory than knowing precisely where to click. That said, these examples use Office 2007; in Word 2003, rather than inserting fields from the Mailings tab, you go to Tools | Letters and Mailings | Mail Merge...

The Science Behind the Magic

An ordinary document is inflexible. Every copy contains no more or less than the exact content you placed in it. A mail-merge document contains rigid content, too, but in addition, it can have instructions to find and insert varying information. Instead of typing

July 1, 2008

Marv Splink 1910 S. Wacker Drive, Apt #1A Des Moines, IA 50315 Dear Marv,

You type the constant elements of the document and give Word directions for filling in the variables:

[date]

[first name] [last name] [address][apt] [city], [state] [ZIP] Dear [first name],

Getting Started

I'm using a form letter I created recently for my co-op. It went to each shareholder and imposed a fee based on the number of shares the member owned, and offered percentage discounts based on rate of payment. Typing separate letters for the 70 or so people who needed to get them would have taken roughly forever. I'll use that document (minus personal information) to demonstrate how you put together a paper mail merge that involves more than just different names and addresses.

STEP 1: Draft Your Letter
I've found the best way to begin is to make a draft of the document with descriptive names for all the variables (name, address, and so forth). I make these field indicators bold to minimize the chance that I'll miss one on the first pass. You typically need to do more than one; few of us think of all the variables or integrate everything perfectly on the first go-round.

For this relatively informal note, I addressed recipients by first name. To address female and male recipients as Ma'am or Sir, you'd create a column for sex in the spreadsheet. If the greeting style may vary, you might make a Greeting column and fill in entries such as Ms. Smith or Jimmy.

Click Insert | Date & Time to insert an updatable field. Before printing and sending, right-click on the field and choose Update Field.

STEP 2: Create a Data Set
Now we need to create a data set for the form letter to reference. Begin by copying all those variable names from your document into the top row of a blank spreadsheet. Each column holds the data for the field with that variable name; each row will contain the data for one recipient. If you're supremely confident you've got the structure perfect, you can enter the info for all recipients. I prefer to enter two samples, then test a merge (which we'll do in Step 4).

Take a look at the slideshow of this data set's evolution.

EDITOR'S TIP: Export Contacts If the people you're writing to—even some of them—are in your e-mail address book, you've got a head start on data entry. In Outlook 2007, click on Contacts, then go to File | Import and Export… and export to an Excel file. You'll need to go through the resulting file and remove any unwanted names, and probably rearrange some of the data, but this step will save you some typing.

Putting It All Together

STEP 3: The Sample Mail Merge
Now it's time to try a sample merge. With the groundwork laid, performing the merge couldn't be easier. Click on the Mailings tab, then Start Mail Merge | Letters. Nothing will happen, yet.

Begin working your way right across that Mailings ribbon. The next button is Select Recipients. If you were doing a simple mail merge—just one basic letter to different recipients, you might simply choose Select from Outlook Contacts, or even Type New List…. Since we already have a data set going, we'll Use Existing List. Select the Excel file containing your data, then (presumably) Sheet 1, and tell Word whether to consider the top row labels or data (in this case, it's labels).

Again, nothing will happen, but some more buttons in the Mailing ribbon will become active. The Address Block and Greeting Line are meant to simplify the mail merge process, but like many wizards, I find they ask you to give up a lot of control. If you have a data set and a draft document, you don't need this "help." I go straight for Insert Merge Field. Use this button to replace each instance of a field placeholder (from Step 1), remembering to unbold the field unless you want it to print in boldface.

EDITOR'S TIP: Empty Sets Sometimes when I've opened and closed my data-set spreadsheet a few times while leaving my letter open, the Select Table dialog will have faulty information, and if I select Sheet 1 as usual, Word fails to associate it with the letter. If this happens, simply close out Word and Excel, then reopen the letter and try again.

EDITOR'S TIP: Info in Common In this example, every recipient has some information in common—namely, the first address line (except the apartment number), city, state, and ZIP. Depending on how you gather the information, it may be easier to leave these as variables, as I did, or change the form letter—for example, with a fixed address, like so: ‹‹Firstname›› ‹‹Lastname›› 1910 S. Wacker Drive, ‹‹apt›› Des Moines, IA 50315

STEP 4: Preview the Final Product

In theory, your work is done. In practice, no one gets a mail merge right on the first try. So the next step is to preview your work. Click on the Preview Results button and you'll see the results of merging the first record (line of data) in your data-set spreadsheet into your document.

If you have a look at the image, you'll see a number of issues. First, formatting cells as currency in Excel doesn't change the data. I can add dollar symbols to each instance—that's easy. More troubling is the varying number of digits after the decimal point. But no matter how Excel displays numbers in a cell, it keeps track of the whole number. To keep the number of digits displayed constant, we need to tell Word to alter the way it displays these numbers, by adjusting the field codes. And doing so means I won't have to type in dollar signs.

To toggle the field-code view, you can right-click on a particular field and select Toggle Field Codes; or select the entire document, right-click, and select Toggle Field Codes. Now insert the code \# to tell Word the field is a number, followed by the appropriate formatting code. In this case, I used $###.00. For numbers in the thousands or above, I would have entered something like $#,###.00, to tell Word to insert a comma; and if I didn't require cents, I'd have left off the zeroes (zeroes after the decimal point instruct Word to display that many digits after the point, and to fill with zeroes if there are no digits, that is, if the number is even, or even to the tenth).

Once you've corrected the codes, right-click again and select Update Field. You should see correctly formatted numbers. For other kinds of numbers (dates, for example), Microsoft's cheat sheet will show you coding fields that will handle numbers the way you want.

Finally, use the Preview Results buttons to page through some or all of the remaining records to make sure you didn't miss any other details. If you find a few that are anomalous, and changing a field code will create problems in the other letters, simply note which letters those are. In my example, a few people do have numbers over 1,000—but I don't want to add extra spaces to all the other letters.

STEP 5: Finish the Project

It's time to merge. If previewing left you satisfied that all the letters will be correct, you can go ahead and merge them right to the printer: Select Finish & Merge | Print Documents…. If not, select Finish & Merge | Edit Individual Documents…. You'll be able to select all or some records to merge, and the records will merge into one big, new document that comprises every single letter, separated by page breaks. You can edit any detail of any letter without affecting the others, then print. For example, the number formatting I chose in the previous step will not add a comma to mark numbers in the thousands. For the few data over 1,000 I can add that comma manually.

Go Paperless

Finally, why not save a tree by using the Finish & Merge | Send Email Messages… option? To do so, you'll need an e-mail address field in your data set. When you select the option to send e-mail messages, you'll be prompted for the name of your e-mail address field and a subject line; you can also choose whether to send all records or a range. You should know, though, that the e-mail merge process can be buggy in Office 2007. Many people have reported problems sending HTML mail, although in these cases, plain-text mail should still work. To confirm that the messages went out, simply check your Outlook Sent Items folder. For those who use another mail client, I strongly advise you to do a quick Web search on your client and "mail merge." The process works if your default mail client is Outlook. Windows Mail evidently can handle a mail merge if the messages are sent as plain text or as attachments, and there seem to have been more problems than successes reported with Thunderbird as the mail client.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.