Lessons

Lesson Info

Segment 20 - Mailmerge in Word

So as we were finishing up our business plan, which is pretty much done, one of the things which I didn't remind us to do with the very very end was to regenerate our table of contents again because we did add in that segment on the kiosks, so I just want to remind everybody one last time to go up tio your table of contents and either control click on it or to finger, click on your trackpad and update your fields. And this is why you do want to update the entire table because we added a whole header just on kiosks, and we want that in here, so I'll click ok, and now we have the kiosk at the bottom of our business plan. Now that that's done, we can save it, and we can close it because we are done with this particular document and a keyboard command that I like for that is command w, which closes just that one window and still leaves word open. So in order to do our mail merge, we're gonna go ahead and quit all the old programs that we used before safari and excel and the batters from sc...

ratch. So when I'm in word, when we're doing a bail merge, you can either start with a blank document or within existing template, and in this project, what we're actually going to do is let's say that I went to a trade show and I have a list of people who bought my jury so I'm going to go and show you in my finder the in the files that we have for this course and if you haven't already unzip the excel files that go with the course, this is a good time to do that that in my finished files and in my x l I have file called customer perches underscore final and so what we're working with here is a list of shows that I did at the christmas season these aren't really this is just pretend stuff so I don't have anybody's real name in here don't worry, but these aerial shows that I did and people's contact information in their email addresses and their street addresses and then it also shows what they bought so you know, eighteen inch necklaces and read and how much they paid planet bracelets, horoscope bracelets the whole gamut so what we're going to dio is back inward we're gonna open up from your downloaded files in the folder that says documents inward I'm sorry from the folder that says mail merge inward because we're on a new unit now there is a thank you letter just plain thank you letter there's a couple other ones there, but we don't want those just thank you letter and go ahead and open that up I am going to shut our sidebar we're not going to be using it for this unit and let me zoom in so you can actually see what's going on now this is one of those times we had played with the date before I'm going to highlight this state this is a letter that I'm going to reuse so instead of me having to manually change this state every single time I'm going to go up teo the insert menu and down to date and time and I'm going to I don't want it to even say thursday anymore I just wanted to say april tenth twenty fourteen but I do want this tow update automatically this time that way the next time I open up this letter if I do it tomorrow it'll say the eleventh if I do it in september it will say september if I open it in january twenty fifteen it will say january twenty fifteen now before I get started with doing this mail merge mel merge has several parts to it it has a main document and that's the one that we have right in front of us that's the document with the fields that it's pulling the data out of the second piece in a mail merge are the data itself and it could be from another word document it could be in excel it could be an outlook it could be in contacts from your mac you can use lots and lots of different data sources for it, so those were the first, so that first there's a letter, then there's the data source, and then the third file is the merged letters themselves, and it could be really hard for people to keep track of which ones are which ones? And so I found just for my own sanity that I renamed the documents so that they actually say what they are. So for this one I want you to do is save as and I'm going to change this to thank you letter, and I'm going to add the word maine on the end, and that allows me to see that this is the original letter with the fields put in that I can reuse any time. So thank you, letter mean, and I'll say that you might need to replace it because that file might already be in your set of files. So now when I look at this thank you note, I can see that I have these placeholders here, this is where I want the address. This is where I won the first name and these air just placeholders, they're just text, we're going to delete each one and replace it with the male merged codes, so to get started with the actual mail merge itself, go up to the tools menu now don't get fooled by emerge documents right here because that is a completely different tool but I actually get calls from people who can't understand why it doesn't work and what merge documents does is take two files and bring them together whole different tool so we want to go all the way down here to mail merge manager and click on that and it opens up this little tobar I'll move that over to the right hand side and we're gonna work it through this pain step by step by step okay so far so good everybody good all right so the very first step is to select the document and there's a create new button here and I'll click on that and we are going to do a form letter and what a form letter does is it makes a separate page for everybody on our contact list so make a form letter the next thing we'll do is go to step two that says get list now this is how we identify where the day the source is for our data we could make a brand new data source if you have ah piece of paper with the list of names on it if you have an existing data source like an excel file we would open the day the source we can use the office address book which is contained in outlook we can use the apple address book which has contacts and it also has the ability to link to a filemaker pro database so you think pull data from almost anywhere we're going to open a data set source, so go ahead and click on open data source and we're going to navigate to our excel folder and find our customer purchases and the final copy that we created and click open now I got a message here this file needs to be opened by the xl workbook text converter, which may pose a security risk of the file you were opening was a malicious file. Click ok to open this file only if you're sure it's from a trusted source what's happening is that it's triggering the words security or microsoft offices security because we're bringing data from one document to another document and macro czar one of the ways that viruses can be spread now I know this is a safe document I made it, I didn't get it from anywhere else, so I am going to click ok and choose it now what it's asking me is, where is the data in this document and I don't want the data in the pivot table I want the data table itself and I'll click ok and now you can see that the data the mail merge manager is opening step by step by step as I go, which is very, very nice so now what I need to do is start putting these data fields in my document nowhere it's getting those data fields let me go back over to my excel document and I can see here the top row of all of these of the spreadsheet has the date and the event first name last name we want to pay attention to address one city state ends it those of the fields that were going to use it and then down here on the right hand side we can see the purchases that they made item purchased length color and price and I'm going to do a command tab which allows me to easily go back and forth between my of files if you don't know that keyboard shortcut that's a really good one to no command tab groups will just zip me back and forth so here's where I want my address block and the first thing I'm going to do is highlight it and delete it because I don't want to say address block and I'll come over to my place holders and I want the person's name so I can either I'm sorry I can pick up first and drag it to where I wanted to go in the document and it brings in first and it puts too little carrots on either side that's my visual clue that these air not words in the document this is the data field being pulled in from xl now you have to put in all the spaces and the punctuation between these fields yourself so because I need a space between my first name in my last name it's up to me to put it there, so I'm gonna press space on my keyboard and now I have a space I'm going to now pick up last and move that into place said I would have first space last and I'll press return to make a new line I'll scroll down a little bit and I'm going to find address one and bring that into place on dh press return next I need my city and what do you need after city on a mailing label? Akama oh, sorry, yeah and that's where a lot of people fall down is they forget that they need the punctuation so city comma space city comma space now to punctuation state space or if you're old enough space space, which is how it used to be and the zip could so now I have the address now I want to address the letter to a person, so I'm going to erase my place holder and I'm going to drag in their first name again so you can see that any fields can be used in multiple places in the document dear first now partway down the letter let me move this over a little bit for you I wanted to drop you and let you know how nice it was to meet you last week at the event, so I'm going to highlight event and erase it put in my space again if I need to go and then drag event into place, I especially want to thank you for your purchase of your something in a color for the price. This is, you know, almost a receipt, so I'm going to get rid of item and then scroll down and find their item purchased and drop that into place double check to make sure you have one space before and up, so I don't have one space after some make sure you put that in, I'll do the same now for the color and making sure I got proper space and before and after and then less but not least price. Okay all then double check and make sure everything else is where it should be in the letter and that looks good. And so now we have told it what fields to get from excel and where to put them in the word document. So our next step is to look down here at the filter recipients, and I'm just going to show it to you, we don't really have to do anything right here. But if you had a database that had a lot of different data in it you don't have to send it to everybody who's on that list you could filter it you could say that they're the date of the event had to be before the state or after the state you khun tell it that you only want people who bought things that were blue you know it literally could be any kind of filter no I don't really want to do any filters right now so I'm going to clear that what is also helpful is sort if you're doing a big bulk mailing if you have over two hundred items and you're not using a bulk mailing house you're doing it yourself they generally ask that you sort everything by zip code yourself ahead of time and so you can actually do that right here in your mail merge so I can tell it to sort by zip and then sort of ascending and then all my zip codes will be in order and then I don't have to spend all that time taking my two hundred letters and reorganizing them it's all done for you and I'll click ok and so now when it runs the data it will print them in zip code order alicia just remind everybody at home that all of the documents the leash is going to be using in this particular segment are available to use you can follow along