Hi everyone, my name is Kevin, and today I'm going to show you how to do
mail merge using Word, Excel, and Outlook. So, first off, what is mail merge? Well, think of it as when the electric
company sends you a bill every month. They customize your bill with your
name, your address information. I'm going to show you how to
do something similar to that. Let's say you want to send out envelopes. Let's say you want to send out a letter or
maybe you want to send out an e-mail and each individual one has custom information
that you want to include on there. That's what we can do with mail
merge, so let's jump right on into. And as we're getting started here, just
as full disclosure, I work at Microsoft. OK, so what I'm going to do first is
I'm going to open up Microsoft Word. So, we're going to pop up Word here, and then
I'm going to open up a new blank document. So here I am in my new blank document, and what we're going to do is
we're going to click on mailings. Now one thing to say is this. What I'm
using right now this is Office 365. Chances are it'll also work
on 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010. I don't think mail merge functionality has
changed that much, but just as a caveat, this is using the latest version
of Office. This is Office 365. So, I'm going to click on mailings and the first thing I'm going to do is there's a little
button there that says start mail merge. I'm going to go ahead and click on that and today
what we're going to do is we're going to create an e-mail message that I'm going to use to
customize the user information in there. You could also create things
like letters, envelopes, labels, directory information, but we're going to do
an e-mail today. The process that you follow, and all these other ones is very
similar to doing an e-mail message. So, I'm going to click on that and like I
said before, I'm going to be sending out a billing notification, so I get
to collect money from people, so we're going to say hello and I want to
customize this. So what I want to do is I need to select information. Now let me
pull my Word document over and here on my desktop I have a sheet called customer
information, so I'm going to pull that up. This is a spreadsheet that I created ahead of
time, and it has four different columns. It has the first name of people, it also
has the plan name that someone is on, it has the due date for the bill,
and it also has the e-mail address. I just use the same e-mail address
on each one and so I want to use this information from this list
in the mail merge that I'm doing. So, we're going to start out here by saying hello
and what I'm going to do now is I want to connect this spreadsheet to this Word document, so
I'm going to click on select recipients. I could create a new list, I can
choose from Outlook contacts, but I have this spreadsheet, so I'm
going to click on use an existing list. And now what I can do is it opens up the file
picker and I'm going to click on my desktop because that's where I have this file stored
titled Customer information. I'm going to click on that and now what it's asking me to do is it
wants me to select a table, and so you'll see in my Excel sheet I have a table, or
a sheet called customer information. So, I'm going to go with that, and then you see this checkbox that says the
first row of data contains column headers. At the very top of my sheet, you'll see that
I have my column header here with first name, plan due date, so I'm going to leave that
checked, and we're going to click on OK. And so now what it's done is
it's connected this spreadsheet with this Word document that I'm creating. So here I'm going to say hello and now what
I could do is there's another option here that says insert merge field. I'm going to click on that and when I click on
the drop down, you'll notice that I have these different columns, and these columns
line up with the Excel spreadsheet. So, I have first name which lines up with
first name, plan, due date, and e-mail. So, I'll say hello and I want
to say hello to the first name. So, I'll click on first name and then
you'll see this little you'll see the text there that's the first thing,
and that's a placeholder for the name, so I'm going to put in a comma and
I'm going to say your, let's say your, and I'm going to put the plan name in, so we’ll
say your so it'll say starter or platinum. Your starter package is due on, and
then we want to insert the due date. So, I'm going to insert another field
and I'm going to insert due date, and so you notice it puts another placeholder
in, it says your let's say starter package is due on such and such a date, and then
I'll say, please submit your payments to 123 Main St. and we're going to say this is
in Seattle, WA and I'll put down the ZIP code. Thank you. Let's say thank you and then we're
going to call this the billing company. OK, so what I've done now is let's
test this out and see how this works. So, they have this option here
that says preview results. So, I'm going to click on that, and so now you'll see it's inserted
the first row from my spreadsheet. So, I have this, John. He's on the starter plan
and it's due on 3/15. So here it says hello John, your starter package is due on 3/15/2019. Please submit your payment to this
address. Thank you, the billing company. Now what I can do is I can click through this
little arrow and that goes to the next record. So here it'll jump to Kerry
and then it jumps to Kevin. That's me, so I'm charging myself, and
here you'll see that the package changes, the date modifies, so here, Kevin, that
lines up with this row here. So, Kevin, on the starter package, here you see starter,
and that's due on 3/18, and you see 3/18. OK, so now I've set it up so
that the message is customized. It's using information from my list in the sheet. Now that we've done that, now I want
to go ahead and send an e-mail out. So how do we do that? Well, I'm going to get rid of the preview
here, so it goes back to the template and then there's a button
that says finish and merge. What I'm going to click on here is you could
print documents or I can send e-mail messages. Today I want to send an e-mail, so I'm
going to click on send e-mail messages, so it says to e-mail, and so what this
is doing is it's using the column e-mail. You can choose any one of the columns, but it automatically detected that this is
an e-mail address, so it chooses that column, and I'm going to say for this subject, I'll
say your bill is due, and then what you could do is it says send to all records, current
record, or I could set specific rows that I want to send it to. So, let's say that I only
want to send bills, say, a month in advance. I could choose, hey, I just want to do, you know, let's say row five and six, and
I just wanted to send it to them. But in this case, I'll send it to, I'll
send it to everyone and then I click OK. So now what's happening is it's going
ahead and it's generating emails. So now what I'm going to do is
I'm going to open up Outlook. So, I'm in Outlook here and you'll see I have my outbox and it says your bill is due,
your bill is due, and each one is customized to the person that I had in the list, and
then what I could do is I'm just going to make sure I click on send and receive, and now
it's going to send each one of those emails. So, there you have it. It's sent out a bill to
these five different people, and hopefully they submit their payment on time,
but that's really that's as easy as mail merge is. You can take a list, you have a Word document,
you could insert information from that list. You could define who you want to send it out to, and then you could send out a bulk number
of whether it's emails or whether it's, let's say a letter and envelopes, and
customize the information on there. So hopefully this information was helpful. Hopefully you found this
tutorial, tutorial valuable, and hopefully that'll take
care of your mail merge needs. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe. That way you'll see future videos like this, and
if you enjoyed it, please give it a thumbs up. That way it helps boost my confidence
that people are taking these videos and using them for something good. OK. Well,
thanks a lot everyone. See you next time.
