Lessons

Lesson Info

Segment 21 - Mailmerge Labels & Powerpoint

Another thing that lots of people like to dio, especially when it comes down to your christmas letters at the end of the air, is actually make mailing labels and so what's neat about it is it could be kind of the standard avery labels that you get from office depot, but it could be a file folder, labels it can be giant labels, whatever kind of labels you have in the box, you can run through your printer and make these so that's, what we're going to do right now is make one of these sheets of labels, so I'm going to leave this up in case we have any other questions, I do want to come back to it, and I'm going to start a new blank document, and again, I can either do a command to end, or I can click on this little button up in the upper left hand corner, and I'll start with a blank. Right now. Our mail merge manager is open just as a reminder. If it wasn't, I would go up to tools and down to the mail merge manager, and that would open up this, uh, chest pain. So now this time, we're goin...

g to start from a blank document, not an already existing document, and I'm going to create new, and this time we're going to make labels. I would also like to point out we're not going to do it right now, but you could also make envelopes and send your envelope straight through your manual feed on your printer and print straight to the envelopes. Now in this case we are going to do labels so click on labels it wants to know if you have a dot matrix printer I haven't actually seen one of those in several years we want to use a laser and inkjet printer that's the default then you have a list of all of your label options and so you can have avery labels there's all different companies on here these air actually international, so if we have anybody watching in japan, you might see your kinds of form near labels on here. Usually avery is the one that like office depot and staples all carry. If you get a generic brand, they will frequently say just like every fifty one sixties or whatever kind of label it is and I'm actually going to take a look at this sheet right here and this one says every eighty one sixty but use avery template fifty one sixty so it actually says right on this particular sheet of labels which one to use? So I'm going to use the avery fifty one sixty two match and that is actually the most common kind of label ten down three a class three across thirty on a page so I've got fifty one sixty here and I will click ok, so it automatically starts coding for me I'm going to build the label here in the first slot and then the next record is just words way of take going to the next line in yourself spreadsheet or the next person in your outlook contacts so we're going to do all our work right here and then propagated out so we've done step one we've identified our main document and we're going tio click on step to get list this time I'm going to use my outlook contacts now if you're at home and you're not using outlook, then you can try using the apple contacts if you're not using either just sit back and watch so I'm going to go and do the office address book, which is again fed by outlook and now it gives me a way of editing the labels and I'm going to insert emerge field now because of using outlook they've got like every field it could possibly be so there might be some trial and error until you find the ones that you actually saved in there, but we're going to start with first name so I click on first name and it puts it in and what do I have to press before I go on the last name first come molest this time with the space bar space bar so first name space insert merge field last thing, then I'll hit return now outlook actually makes it easy for us that instead of having to go city comma state comma zip there's this address field right here, this is one of alicia's tips to save you time if you use a right above home address and business as rest. There's just one straight up address. I'm gonna go ahead and click on that one and that's actually going to use the street and the city and the state and the zip for me found that out by trial and error, but a chair it with you, I'll click ok. And so now it put that information in, and it propagated it out across all the rest of the labels, just like before. I have filter options now because I'm using outlook. Remember when we did the outlook in unit, and I really emphasized using categories here's, another place where your categories show up, you consent just to one particular group of people in your outlook. So for example, if you have a christmas list, just you can make a category called christmas list and add all of your contacts to that group for christmas lists, who you want to get christmas cards every single year, and then at the end of the year when it's time for the next round you just look at that list of names and add anybody else or delete anybody that you need to take off and then you're ready to go with the same set of labels that you did the year before so categories air in a nice way of shortening alicia keep you guessing is asking the chat room can you do the labels do have to make cell can you import them from house from your apple contacts? Yeah, the get list option let me go ahead and click ok here who was that hold one second data source were empty ok to answer that question the get list right here here's the apple address book right here and so that will go to your apple contacts and in addition that filter down at the bottom will allow you to pull from any groups that you have in your apple contacts so that same effect is happening I'm not sure why I don't have the first name and last name working so let's go in and pull some different data files and see what's happening here so I'm going to make some changes I'm gonna wipe out what I have here and see why I'm getting that error um this time may get list I'm using the office address book I want to just experiment here first name space last name let's see, I'm going to devote a little bit let's see if the problem is here okay, that works so now let's go in and try that address line again so I go down to the next let me try just pulling it over this time and if I make a change doing it this way in order to propagate it across the labels if I go back up to the recipients list in step two there's a button right here that says filling the items to complete your document you can see it has arrows to the right and arrows down and that will replicate your changes to all of your labels let's check and see if that worked no it's still didn't so the problem I'm having is with that address so let's try a different approach on it let me actually just try home address and see if that works what a drag in home address replicate it and go down to the preview results and click on this whole abc boom there it is this time so when I said use that address so again don't get fooled into thinking that you've run your merge especially after you hit this preview results but this is still not your merged labels you still have not major labels so we still have to do with the last step of merging but before we do that we never did save this file so I'm going to go up to file and down to save or command us again it's gonna pull in whatever it sees first this is not actually amy morgan this is my my avery labels maybe I'll call this labels fifty one sixty to tell me what size they are and then just like before so that I can stay consistent across all of my projects a label this is me and click safe now it's time to actually do my merge go down to step six and again don't forget that there is a step six and I'm going to merge to a new document and it thinks and then it prints it lays out the labels now the last thing that I do before actually printing these out because you know it's a computer it's never clean what I actually dio is a little experiment I'll print out these labels on just a plain blank piece of paper so that I've got this on paper so it is the labels I can see how many pages it is because what you don't want to do is go straight to the printer and then something goes wrong and now you have just wasted a sheet of labels so putting it on paper is going to save you from doing that so now what you do with this sheet of paper that you have is take a blank sheet of labels and hold the paper behind the labels and hold it up to the light and then you'll be able to see the text coming through the sheet and you can see if I don't know if you guys were able to see through through here but I can actually see where the words are on each of the labels and if nothing's getting cut off if nothing's going off of the edge of the labels, then I'm good to go and if something's wrong that gives me the opportunity to go back to my main document, maybe I have to change the label size maybe the label size wasn't right, and so that gives me the opportunity to not waste labels and to trouble shoot anything that I need after that point, I've done my troubleshoot I can go back to my labels and send my actual sheets of labels through my printer, and that ends you up with a sheet of labels that looks like this just using the thought that happens to be picked as you got it is, but if you don't want that again, go back, I'm going to close this labels to that got generated and I'm not even going to save the merge document if I don't like the font aiken simply go in change the font to something something that I do like and again propagate that change down across all of the labels and because I've done it in my main document and I say that now that change is available for all of my future labels, I only needed to do it one time yeah, you could, um you can probably do anything to this that you want to you can change the font color you can, um may things boulder, right, alec, if you put an image on, you do need to make sure that it fits within the cell and the grid lines and one little hint with this, and this is not just for labels. This is true for any table that you're working with. If you go to the notice that these labels are actually a table again, my visual cue are these little star shapes of the end of a cell and the little arrow up in the corner, but this table is not showing the grid lines and that's on the table layout ribbon the first button here says grid lines these are not things that print this is just to show you the visual. So now that I've done that, you can go in and add a graphic. I'm not sure you would if the graphic would propagate when you hit this button, or if you would need to replace it into location on the page, you'll have to experiment with that, okay, any other questions about new merge okay, anything in the chat room just while our brian wants to know why you don't know his address, because he was the one that I pulled in from the contacts in the first lesson, yes, or pulled in from the email, my husband's probably asking the same thing, okay, any other mail merge questions? If not, we're going to shift gears. We all ready to move on? Definitely are ok, you very much, absolutely so there's mail merge in a nutshell, we did two kinds of mail merge, we did a form letter, and we did a label, and we made it emerged from two different places. We emerged from an excel spreadsheet, and from our outlook contacts that we worked with yesterday. So for your next trick, since we're looking at ways of collaborating between all the different programs we've seen excel inside word, we've seen outlook inside word let's use word, tio integrate with power point, which is a leading for tomorrow, because we're going to do power point in depth tomorrow, so I'm going to go ahead and close all my mail merge documents. I'm going to close my main documents, close my merged documents, if it asks you to save anything, go ahead and do that safe, okay notice we've been doing so many documents that my blank document count is now up to document eight doesn't matter what that number is once we start saving it, what I actually want to do is open up our, um our business plan that we've been working on, so go back up to the file menu and down tio open recent and I'm going to open up my jewelry store kiosk business plan if you haven't been working with our files then if you have any document that has heading one, two and three in it, you'll be able to do this exercise so I'll open up my business plan it wants to know hey check this out this document contains one or more links to other files what final was that? That was our excel earlier do you want to update this document with data from the link files so that's actually very considerate of word that it wants to know hey, maybe some data in excel was changed let's go get the updated data very nice I can also close the mail merge manager in fact I'm going to also quit excel let's just focus on our casts at hand so the only file that I have open now is just my business plan and as a review one of the steps that we did earlier and actually several times was to go through our document and designate different parts as that using these styles up at the top of heading one heading to and heading three, and I promise you from the beginning that stiles did a lot of different things, so just as a review on styles, we saw that it does multiple formatting, it turned this text from the same is this to believe every sixteen gold and blue, and then heading to it made all of our heading two's calibri fourteen bold and light blue, and we made some changes to these, and all we had to do was change one of them and then control, click or right click on the heading, and it allowed us to update it to match the selection, and that allowed us to that has came down all of our changes. We didn't have to change something sixteen times styles informed our table of contents, so this was built off of all the styles that we used, and now those same styles are going to allow us to convert this document into a power point. So the premise here, I'm trying to get funding, and so I have this business plan all put together, and I want tio make a power point that either I'm going tio give to a funding source, or maybe I'm going to put it up on youtube or kick starter in order to raise money and do some fundraising, so all kinds of options now I'll preface this was saying that it doesn't do a perfect job of it there's some tweaks that you have to do along the way but I'll walk you through this so the very first step is to go up to the file menu and do a save as and when we do save as we're going to change the format of this document and we're going to save it as an r t f and that's going to allow power point to read this as a rich text format which puts it in a format that translates between the two prote programs so I'm saving when the save as I'll leave the same name but I'll change it too rich text format and I'll click safe okay, so next I need to open a power point if you have power point down on your doc it's this orange p if it's not down on your doc but you know you have power point one of my favorite little shortcuts is going up to the magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner of your screen and all I have to do is type p o w boom it recognizes power point and I could just hit return and power point opens I'm just going to open up a blank presentation just a blank white presentation all I have to do is click choose now instead of having to sit there with my business plan and copy everything and make all of these slides were going to import beheadings into slides, so I'm going to go up to the insert menu and then choose slides from outline again insert slides from outline and it wants to know where that's at and I've been saving that in my kiosk plans. If I can't see my extensions, I could make this a little longer. Um, I can tell by the icons that this one's the word document and this one with the different icon is the rich text format, so I'll choose this one and I'll click uncertain and it thinks for a few minutes, and now, it's added some slides. Now look at this, ok, this one said jewelry store kiosk that's going to make a good title slide? There is a blank slide at in slide number one, and I'll just click on it and delete it. I've got a blank slide and slide number two, and I click on it and delete it, but there's my executive summary there's my business objectives, I have some slides here where it turns them into the bullets turned into slides and I don't really need those, so I'm going, tio skip, we're going to jump down to slide eighteen and hold the shift key and click on it, and I'm going to just delete all of those because next I have my company description look at that all of the heading ones have now become slide titles and all of my heading twos have now become bullet points and all of my heading three's have now become some bullets and I may have some editing to do in a few different places and a few things that are extra slides that we need to take out but as far as turning that business plan into a framework for a power point that was a lot faster than typing it in simple simple when you know how the trick is doing that export and saving it as an art e f that's the missing piece for why it frequently doesn't work you know it's not completely clean you usually have to clean it up a little bit but that's pretty easy to do and so that's kind of our segway into our next sessions unit on power point you can go ahead and save this if you would like and I'll say it again as the kiosk business plan and because we made a folder for this earlier I want to remind you that right now it's not giving me any ability to go into that folder that I need but this triangle right here is your best friend when I click on it I now can navigate within my file structure and put this in kiosk plans where it belongs answer does anybody have any questions about the power point conversion? Anything from our from our money? It's. Good there. Are you familiar with happen hallways, this new chief I made, I have a mac, so I play with key note. So I was wondering if you bounce back and forth between the two or I'm usually using one or the other, generally with me and the two sets of programs with my work, which is pages, numbers in key note, and, um, word. I used both of them. I use microsoft office whenever I'm doing things that I, you know, we're going to have to interface with other people. And if I'm just making something myself, I frequent will use pages because the because of some of the tools that it has, and so I'm kind of bilingual. I did.