Hi everyone. My name is Kevin. Today I want to show you how you can use mail
merge to create address labels. So, what do I mean by that? Well, imagine that you have a list of addresses. So maybe in Excel or in Outlook, you have
a list of maybe 30, 50, 60, maybe even hundreds of addresses and you want to print each one
of those addresses onto an address label. Well, one way to do that is you could create
a new address label sheet in Microsoft Word, and you could go through, and you could copy
and paste each address into one of the labels and then you could print it out. But that sounds really painful and that's
also going to take a long time. Today I'm going to show you how you can use
mail merge in Word to greatly simplify that task. And as full disclosure before we jump into
this, I work at Microsoft as a full-time employee. All right, well what are we waiting for, Let's
jump on the PC. So here I am on my desktop and what we're
going to do is we're going to open up Microsoft Word. This is the latest version. This comes with Office 365. If you have 2019, 2016, 2013 or any older
version, this should work as well because mail merge has been available for some time. So here I am on the home screen. Let's click into a blank document and what
I'm going to do is click on the mailings pivot on top because we're going to do a mail merge
and to do a mail merge we go to mailings. And what we're going to click on first is
there's a section called start mail merge. We're going to click on this first option,
start mail merge and at the very bottom of this list, there's an option that's called
step by step mail merge wizard. Wizards sound like they know how to do lots
of things so let's see what the wizard can help us with. So, I'm going to expand this a little bit
and it says what type of document are you working on? Well, I mentioned that we're going to do address
labels, so let's go ahead and click on labels. And what it says is print address labels for
a group mailing. Click next to continue. Sounds easy enough. Let's click next. Starting document. And now it says how do you want to set up
your mailing labels and what I want to do is we're just going to change the document
layout. So that sounds good, and it says click label
options to choose a label size. I'm going to go ahead and click on that and
what you'll see is it pops up with this prompt. Here I specify what type of printer I have. I just have a standard page printer, so I'll
select that, and then you can select the vendor of your label. So, if you bought labels on say Amazon or
from Staples, there will be a vendor who created those. In this case I'm just going to go with Microsoft
labels, but you also have things like Avery, and you have all the different companies here. But we'll just go with Microsoft and then
you'll go through and select the product number. So, if you bought address labels there should
be some name for the product. I'm just going to go with this 30 per page
and you can see the details of the label here so that should match the type of labels that
you bought. So, all that looks good. I'm going to go ahead and click on OK. So now I've selected the label option and
we're going to go through and click on select recipients. Now what I want to do is I'm going to jump
into Excel for a moment because this is where I have my list of recipients. So, I'll zoom in a little bit and just to
orient you to the data that I have here, I have one column with the name of the individual. In the next column, in column B, I have their
street address. Then I have the city that they live in, the
state, and the zip code. So, this is all the data that I have in an
Excel spreadsheet, and you can see I have quite a few of these. So, the last thing I would want to do is have
to go through and insert these into a label one by one. So, I'm going to go back to Word and what
we're going to do is I'm going to say use names and addresses from a file or database. So, I'll go ahead and click on browse. What you could also do here is you could select
from Outlook contacts, or you could even select type in a new list. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on browse
and I'm going to go to my desktop where I have this spreadsheet with all my names and
addresses. And you'll see here that you know the main
worksheet is called sheet one and my first row of data contains column headers. So, if I go back, you see I have all my column
headers here. So, I'm going to go ahead and let's click
on OK and now it pulls in all of my addresses. So, there it goes. I could even uncheck some if I don't want
to include them on the mailing but in this case, I'll leave all of them checked. What's kind of neat too is I also have ways
where I can refine the recipient list. So here I could sort my list if I wanted to. I could even filter it. So here if I click on filter what I could
say is you know maybe I only want to send it to people in New Jersey so I could filter
to New Jersey if I wanted to. And you could add you know and another filter
and maybe they live in a certain town, or you could even have an or statement but we're
not going to do that. We're just going to send it to everyone on
this list. I could remove duplicates. I could find a specific recipient. I can even validate addresses. So, there's really a lot of rich functionality
here but I'm just going to go with kind of the base full list and I'm going to click
on OK. So now you'll see that I'm in my address label
sheet and I have all these. You could see each one of the address labels
I have 30 on the sheet. And so, what I'm going to do now is it says
the next step is to arrange my label. So, I'm going to go ahead and let's click
on arrange my labels. And here what it says if I haven't done so
already organize this so I'm going to click on an address block. And so here I could kind of see the formatting
of what that looks like and I can go through and so it has the name, the street, the city,
the state, and the zip. That looks great. And I'm going to go ahead and insert it as
is. And so, what Outlook has or what Word has
done is they've looked at my Excel data and they've identified that those different columns
form an address block. I could also go through, and I could create
my own label here but address block sounds good. That includes all the information I need. And so, what I want to do now is this first
one has the address block but none of the other ones do. And so, what I want to do now is I'm going
to update all labels. So, it says replicate labels. You can copy the layout of the first label
to the other labels on the page. Well, that sounds good. Let me click on that. And so now you'll see that it says address
block and the next record address block. What the next record means is it simply goes
to the next row in my spreadsheet and includes the next person and then it puts that next
person's address block down and it does that for the entire sheet. What we could do to make sure that things
look right is I'll click on this preview results. So, if I click there now, I can see the name,
the street, the city, state, and zip, and then I see the next person and my address
labels simply go down like that. I'm going to turn off the preview now and
here the next step of the wizard actually shows me a preview. So, I can go through, and I can see all the
recipients one by one. This all looks great. And now I can complete the merge so I'm just
going to click on next. And what it says is I can either edit individuals
or I could just print out my address my mail merge for address labels. So, I'm going to go ahead and let's click
on print. And I want to print all the records, so I'll
just click say all. I could also say I just want to print you
know a certain number of the current record or I could say hey only you know my Excel
sheet. Let's say person 25 through 50 just them but
in this case, I'm going to go with all. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going
to print a PDF to show you what this looks like, but I could also just print to a printer
as well. I'm going to go ahead and click on OK and
it's going to ask me now to save the PDF. I'm just going to put it on my desktop and
now it's printing it out. So, let's see what this looks like. So, I'm going to go back to my desktop and
we're going to click on this PDF file. And what you'll see happen now is I have a
sheet with all the names the addresses, all basically all the address information. And so now if I were to print this to a printer
and I had these address labels this would successfully give me my 50 something address
labels all customized to my Excel sheet. So that's really all that's involved. Once I'm done, I could save this, or I could
just close it out and I'm pretty much all done. Anyway, hopefully this was helpful. If this helped you figure out how to use mail
merge to create address labels, please give this a thumbs up. If you want to see more videos like this in
the future, please hit that subscribe button. That way you get a notification anytime new
content like this comes out. And lastly, if there are any other topics
that you want to learn about, any other topics you want to see me cover on this channel,
leave a comment down below. I'll read it and I'll add it to my list of
videos to create in the future. And hey, that's all I have for you today. Hope you enjoyed. I'll see you next time. Bye.
