Mail Merge to Create Holiday Letters

The holidays are here and many people will want to send out letters bragging about outlining their year and letting friends and family know what they’ve been up to since the last letter.

MS Word has a perfect solution for that in Mail Merge.

For this to work well, you will need some source data. An Excel spreadsheet works perfectly well for this, but if you use Outlook to maintain your contacts, that can be a good thing to use as well. We’ll be running with Excel today because I feel like it J

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have a list in an Excel spreadsheet with the information you want saved.

After that, you’ll write your letter, making sure to have place markers where you want the information to go. As a place marker, I’ve put brackets around the text I am going to be turning into fields for the mail merge.

Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Rust

                            1 Treacle Mine Road

                            White River Junction, VT 05001

                            December 1, 2016

<Firstname> <Lastname>

<Address>

<City>, <State> <Zip>

Dear <Firstname>,

Happy Holidays. I hope <Spouse> and <child1> are doing well.

This year has been a difficult one for me. My oldest daughter, Buffy, was accepted to Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Columbia University. It was such a stressful time trying to decide where to send her! Our son, Digby, won the Decathlon at the most recent Olympics, but only Ronald could be at the award ceremony because I, of course, had to be at Stephanie’s ceremony where she won the gold for the 100-meter Freestyle at the same time. It was cause for quite a bit of tension Chez Rust, I can tell you. Really, the Olympic committee ought to know better than to schedule conflicting events, don’t you think?

After this summer, we remodeled our house, and I have to admit that was a comfort. I’d had the same kitchen for a whole three years, and just needed an upgrade!

Ronald has been working on some mysterious project in the basement that he just won’t tell me about. We keep getting medical grade equipment – bone saws and grinders… I cannot imagine what he’s going to create, but I’m sure that next year’s letter will have some exciting news of a new invention.

Do keep in touch. We miss hearing from you!

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year,

After we have our text, it is time to start the Mail Merge.

1. In the form letter, place the cursor where you want to insert the merge field.
2. In the Write & Insert group, click Address Block to open the Insert Address Block dialog box. You’ll use this dialog box to insert the address merge fields.
3. From the “Insert recipient’s name in this format list, select a format for the merge field. By default the company name and postal address are inserted along with the same field. You can also clear these setting, if you prefer.
4. Click OK.
5. In the Write & Insert Fields group, click Greeting Line to open the Insert Greeting Line dialog box.
6. Select a greeting-line format and click OK.
7. In the Write & Insert fields group, click Insert Merge field and choose the merge field you want to insert.

When you are done, you can click Preview Results.

The letter should look something like this:

If you like the way it looks, you can then click on Finish and Merge. This generates a new document, each letter on its own separate page. You can save that document, and even edit it, if you want to personalize particular letters to particular people. I don’t think it would be Poppy’s thing, of course. J