How to Mail Merge Letters - Office 365

hi everyone my name is kevin today i want to show you how you could use mail merge to customize letters why would you possibly want to use mail merge with letters and what does that even mean well imagine that christmas is coming up and you want to send all of your friends and family a letter well what you'd probably want to do is you want to customize the greeting you probably want to use their first name in the letter uh just to make it seem more personal otherwise your family might say hey like who's this person just sending me a generic message you can use it in many other examples as well christmas letters is just one example let's say that you're a utility company or let's say that you're anyone else who wants to send out customized letters mail merge enables you to do that and now as full disclosure before we jump into this i work at microsoft as a full-time employee so why don't we jump to it and i'll show you how you could do a mail merge here i am on my pc and i'm going to be using word that comes with office 365 so this is the latest and greatest but even if you have an older version let's say 2019 2016 2013 any other version mail merge has been around for a while and you should be able to follow along what i did is i just clicked into a blank document and where we want to go is the mailings pivot so i'm going to go ahead and click on mailings up on top here and what we want to do is the one that sounds most promising is start mail merge so let's get started here and what i want to use is the step-by-step mail merge wizard that's by far the easiest way to do a merge so let's go ahead and click on that and today what i want to do what type of document are you working on well we're working on a letter so i'm going to go ahead and click on letter and then we're going to click on start let's go ahead and i'm going to actually select from a template now let's say that you were writing a letter you could just go ahead and click on this use current document or you could even just select from an existing document but in this case i don't have one so i'm just going to select a template and let's click on the letters tab and i'm just going to go with a let's go with let's say this one this looks like a good template and so there it is it inserted this template into the document and now let's select the recipients now what i've done ahead of time is i have this excel spreadsheet and i have all these names so i have first name last name i have their address the city the state and the zip code so i have all this information in an excel sheet and there are a lot of people in this excel sheet so i don't want to have to go through letter by letter and have to type in each name that would be a pretty big burden to have to do that so i'm glad i have this list and i can customize my letter based on this information in this sheet so i'm gonna go ahead and minimize excel and let me go through now and let's just see here it says so i have the option of using an existing list why i have an existing list in the excel sheet i could also select from outlook contacts or i could type in a new list but in this case i already have a list and i'm going to go just browse and select the list that i just showed you so here's my list and we're going to select that it says sheet1 that's what i have here that's sheet1 and the other thing is it says first row of data contains column headers well if i look in my excel sheet and i go to the top of the sheet these are my column headers here so i have column headers that looks good and i'm going to go ahead and click on ok and so what it does now is it shows me all of the mail merge recipients so this matches what i had in my excel sheet and what's kind of nice is i could go through now i could sort the list i could even filter the list you know maybe i only want to send to let's say my family who lives in new jersey and then i could even say and maybe specifically in this city but i don't want to do that for now but you do have the ability to filter and you also have the ability to sort your list and you could also find individual recipients you can validate your addresses so quite a bit of rich functionality of what you can do here but in this case i want to send it to everyone so let's just click on ok so next i'm going to go ahead and write the letter so let's go on to step four of the process and it says now write your letter okay so let me insert the date here today's october 6th and then here it wants me to enter my company name and my company address i'm not going to have a company name but i'll just type in my address so 12132 main street and we'll say i'm in redmond washington the home to microsoft and then now it says type the recipient name so what i want to do is the i have the recipient name in my spreadsheet how do i get it into here well here i can add information and so what's kind of neat is um if i click on more items down here i'll go ahead and click that now i could insert items from my excel spreadsheet and so all of these fields are based on my headers in excel remember i have first name last name street address so on and so forth and so here i'll start with maybe the first name and then i'll put in the last name okay so let's go ahead and close that for now and i want to make sure i insert a space between these so you'll see this is a placeholder for the first name and this is a placeholder for the last name now it says type the recipient address and i'm going to go ahead and click on address block and it actually looks like it includes a name in there as well so i could have just done this instead of inserting the name on my own so i'm going to go ahead and let's just click on ok and then i'll just remove the first name and last name so i just have my address block there and so it says type the salutation so maybe i'll say dear and then what i could do is i could go back to this more items and i can insert the first name and then i'll put in a comma after the first name then i have all my text body and then i'll have my closing and maybe i say regards and i'll just remove these two down here for now and so what i could do now is i've customized the letter you know i have the person's name in there i have the person's address in there and so now let's go ahead and click on preview your letter so let me go ahead and click on that and so here you know i have my you see my information and here's bob jones and i could also click on this to preview the results right up here and what i could do is if i click on this little arrow that'll bring me to the next record so basically the next row in my excel spreadsheet so i'll click on that and so you'll see how the address updates to the individual who you know the row is on and you'll see that it inserts their name right up in there and so i could go through all my records and let's see how it looks so this is great it's customized my letter to each individual i don't have to go through one by one and insert the address or insert the name it basically does it for me but this looks fantastic and now i'm going to click on complete the merge and so by completing the merge what that what that allows me to do is i could either edit individual letters so that'll just give me a word document with each individual letter or what i could do is i could click on print and by clicking on print this will simply print out all 50 something letters that i have so i'll go ahead and let's click on the print button and i could print everything or i could only print you know a certain number of records so just for this example i'm going to print just let's say two of them just just to do an example i'm going to click on ok and i'm just going to print a pdf just to demonstrate how this works but you could also select your printer on there and then print all the letters i'm going to go ahead and click on ok and now i have to choose what i want to save it as so i'm just going to say test and so what it did now is it it printed them out so let's go ahead and i'll click into this pdf that i just printed and what you'll see is here's my the first letter that's customized to bob and if i scroll down farther now i see my second letter customized for rosamond but that's that's really how easy it is to do a mail merge to be able to customize letters it's super easy if you're using word if you're using excel that has your list of contacts you can customize your letter and keep in mind it's not just limited to names or addresses you could put all sorts of other information in your excel spreadsheet so thinking back to the example of maybe a let's say a christmas letter that you want to send out maybe you include the person's kids name so you could ask the question how is you know samantha and nancy how are they doing and so you could make it seem like you really customized the letter uh fully for each individual who you're sending to it sending that letter to and your family will probably be really impressed they'll think wow how do you have so much time to write these customized letters anyway hopefully you enjoyed it if you found value please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see future videos like this please hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and lastly if there are any other topics that you want me to cover in the future leave a comment down below i'll take a look and i'll add it to my list of videos to make all right well that's all i have for you today hope you enjoyed see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 236,000

Keywords: mail merge, word, excel, microsoft, office, microsoft office, office 365, how to, tutorial, mail merge in word, excel mail merge, mail merge example, example, sample, icon, field, column, spreadsheet, workbook, o365, office 2019, office 2016, office 2013, office 2010, office 2007, format, wizard, steps, snail, cover letter, custom, process, guide, expert, address label, address, envelope, envelopes, letter, letters, mail, mailing, post, bulk mail, bulk, postage, postal, service

Id: nyc0B3_vq1Q

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2020