How to mail merge from Excel to Word

[Music] hey everybody melissa here welcome to my channel i'm so excited you're all here so today we're going to be in word and we're going to be looking at mail merge to create letters and envelopes now i know i know you're like merge no and i get it i really do i'm not going to lie mail merge was one of the hardest concepts for me to get in word now once i got it i can do mail merge in my sleep oh but i was not happy when i first had to learn mail merge and if you ever have to print off hundreds of letters or even email hundreds of letters mail merge is your best friend to streamline that process and i can't wait to show you how it works so let's go ahead and get started so i have this business letter it's a one-page document and it's going to be sent to right around 100 recipients now we could enter this information manually for each letter but i know you don't have time for that and i don't have time for that so we're going to use mail merge to automate that process so before we start our mail merge process we need to review the information that's in our excel spreadsheet so this spreadsheet contains information about my recipients their last name first name company name address information phone number and email address now there's a couple things that we need to check to verify the integrity of our data now one thing we need is a header for each column which we have the next thing we want to do is take a glance at it and make sure that there's no unwanted spaces like james here doesn't have j space a-m-e-s because that will mess up our mail merge then make sure your columns are formatted the way you need them to be for example i have address city state and zip in four different columns if you need yours in one column then you can merge these but for what i'm doing they can be in four separate columns so let's just scroll down just take a quick look at our data and everything looks okay so now what we want to do is save our spreadsheet and close it out now it's time to start our mail merge process now if we go over to our mailings tab our first inclination is to just click here and start the mail merge now hang on just a second bear with me because there's a couple things that we need to do first now before we go any further i want you to notice that address block greeting line and insert merge field are grayed out and can't be used i'm going to show you what happens to those in just a couple of steps but i want you to notice that for right now so the first thing that we want to do is go to select recipients and if we do our drop down we have the ability to type a new list which will bring up this box and we could enter all 100 recipients manually but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense so i'm going to cancel out of here we also have the ability to choose from outlook contacts so if you have all of your recipients in outlook then you can do your mail merge from there but since we are using an excel spreadsheet that contains them we're going to click on use an existing list navigate to where our excel spreadsheet is click on it come down to open and then if you noticed it didn't open the sheet itself but it did open this box that says select table now because we only had one sheet within our workbook word went ahead and selected this sheet now if you have multiple sheets within your workbook it will try to determine which sheet it is that you are wanting to use but you may have to change it if it doesn't pick the correct one now down on the left here we have first row of data contains column headers ours does so we need to make sure this is checked now before i hit ok watch what happens to these that are grayed out up here they're not grayed out anymore which means they can be used so now if we go to edit recipient list it brings up everything that is in our spreadsheet it has all of our recipient information now if we have someone in the list that we don't want the letter to go to so say we wanted to go to everyone except for james smith then we can uncheck him and it will not send a letter to him we have the ability to sort our recipients we can filter our recipients let's just say that we cannot send this to anyone in the state of kentucky tell it okay and then we can uncheck those names and to put it back just go back in and remove your filter we can find duplicates if we missed that during the step where we were checking the integrity of our data we can find a specific recipient and we can validate addresses using a address validation software so we have what we need for right now so let's go ahead and tell it okay now let's look at how we change dear recipient to reflect a name that is in our spreadsheet so if we go ahead and highlight it and go to our mailings tab and go to greeting line we get this box here where we can make some customizations now in the first drop down we can tell it whether to say dear recipient 2 or none so i'm going to leave that one dear and then in the next drop down we can tell it how we want their name formatted and there's multiple ways that we can do it but i'm just going to leave it as their first name and last name and then in the next drop down we can decide if we want it to be followed by a comma a semicolon or nothing and i'm going to leave it a comma and then in the next area if we have a missing recipient name and we do the drop down we can do dear sir madam to who it may concern or none but i'm probably going to leave it dear sir or madam in this next area we can do a preview and we can go through several of our names just to see what they're going to look like and then we see correct problems now let's just say when you make these changes you don't see anything in this field if you go to match fields this is where we can look and see what column it's pulling our information from in excel so if you don't have anything in the greeting line you would want to check here to see if it says first name and last name if it doesn't then you just do your drop down and you change it and then you can tell it to remember this matching for this set of data sources on this computer i'm very careful about checking that and generally don't because if something changes on my spreadsheet this can actually mess it up so that is totally up to you i just generally leave it unchecked and now we're going to tell it okay and then we're going to tell this okay and watch what happens if you see our dear recipient is there but then so is greeting line now that this is here we don't need their recipient anymore we can take it out and when we go to do our mail merge this greeting line is going to be replaced with dear james smith comma now let's look at our address go ahead and highlight it and then go up to address block and then this box pops up and we have the ability to choose how we want their name to display in the address line which this is fine do we want it to insert the company name and i do insert postal address i want it to have the address and then format the address according to the destination country region yes and then this is how it's going to display this is our preview box so let's say we don't want it to display the company name if we uncheck it it'll show us what it's going to look like and then we can preview a couple of records and that looks pretty good okay so we also down here have the correct problems and it works the same way as it did on the recipient line if we go to match fields then we have our first name last name and we have our address city zip and if any of these look incorrect just do your drop down make any changes you need to make and then tell it okay and now let's tell it okay and now as you see we have address block so we no longer need the rest of this recipient information so just from this address block it's going to put in first name last name company and the full address so let me show you a couple of things before we move on to the next step in the mail merge process while we're still in our mailings tab if we go to insert merge field this contains every field that is in our spreadsheet and we can insert any of these wherever we want within this letter let's just say that we want to insert the phone number click on it it inserts the phone number let's say we want to insert the email address click on email address and it will insert that as well but i'm going to take these out because we do not want these you can also highlight merge fields so if you have a really long letter and you've inserted say 10 15 merge fields this will allow you to very quickly find them to make sure everything looks okay now let's preview our results if we click on preview results you can see it replaced the address block with the address information and the greeting line to the recipient's name now even though we checked for errors before we have the ability to do it in this step as well before we finalize the merge if we go up to check for errors we have three options we can simulate it and report errors to a new document we can show the errors as they happen or we can complete the merge and then send the errors to a new document i generally keep mine as complete the merge pausing to report each error because it's really quick even though we're sending 100 of these the process is really fast for it to pause and you to see a problem fix it and let it move on but this is going to be totally up to you so let's go ahead and say okay so if we go to finish and merge and do our drop down we have three options we can edit the individual documents and that is going to create all of the letters in one continuous word document so let's go ahead and click on it and i'll show you what i mean we're going to tell it all records tell it ok and now we have a document that has every single one of our letters in it and we'll close out of here and not save it our next option that i want to look at is send email messages let's click on that one and if you notice when this box pops up it defaults to email underscore addresses because that is a field that we have in our spreadsheet you can put in a subject line you can select the mail format which html should be fine or you can send it as an attachment and you can tell it which records to send and tell it okay at the point you hit ok it will open up your outlook client and send the letters and finally print them you can tell it the records tell it okay select your printer and print them off now let's look at how to print envelopes to go with your letters from a blank word document we want to go to mailings start mail merge and envelopes and then an envelope options box pops up now under size we can pick a standard size or we can go down and create a custom size we can change the fonts for both the delivery address and the return address and this is a preview of what our envelope will look like now if we go to printing options you can see that it has my printer here and this is what it believes the default settings will be from the feed method whether it's face up or face down and where it's feeding from now i would recommend that you print one envelope out to make sure these settings are correct before you select your entire batch if it's right then great you can go on if not you can come in here and make any changes that you need to make so that they print correctly let's tell it okay and as you can see word has changed this document to where it's in the shape of an envelope now if we go down to where our address would be go to select recipients and we're going to use the same list that we used for our letters select your excel document tell it to open and then our select table box will pop up and this is the correct sheet and our first row does have headers so tell it okay and now we can go up and select address block the same box will pop up and this is the same settings that we have for our letters so it should be okay but let's just double check our settings then go ahead and click ok and as you can see it inserted address block just like it did on our letters if we go up to preview we can see what it's going to look like now let's enter our return address if we click in the upper left hand corner we can enter it there make sure you save your document in the same place you save your letters and name it the same thing except for add envelope at the end of it in case you need them later now we're ready to go up to finish and merge print documents and you will now have the envelopes to match your letters and there you have it that's how you create letters and envelopes using mail merge now just keep in mind that the more you use it the easier it will get if you found this video helpful please be sure to give it a thumbs up drop me a comment and click on that subscribe button before you go and i'll see you in the next tutorial until then thanks so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Melissa Compton

Views: 23,849

Keywords: mail merge, mail merge in word, word mail merge, mail merge excel to word, mail merge example, word tutorial, microsoft word mail merge, melissa compton, melissa compton word, melissa compton mail merge, how to, tutorial, microsoft, microsoft word, microsoft excel, mail merge with attachment, excel mail merge, microsoft office, bulk mail, mail merge in ms word, mail merge from excel to word, How to mail merge from Excel to Word, excel, word

Id: fBmqwkpwBpo

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021