How to Do Mail Merge in Word

Microsoft word is a very versatile software tool which offers complete document management for you. There are so many nice features that only Word can provide you. Mail merging is one of such feature, which helps you to reduce time and effort spent on sending mails to multiple recipients. As the name indicates, mail merging merges the main document and different addresses to create multiple documents with the same content but of different recipient and addresses.

Although it seems very difficult for a new user, it is in fact very easy to perform mail merging. Let us start doing mail merge right away. You can locate this great feature by going to Tools->Mail Merge from the top menu provided in word. The ensuing wizard will have three buttons.

1. Create: If you click create, a new document can be created that is ready for mail merge. Active window or new window can be used for creating a mail merge document.
2. Data Source: Data source allows you to create a new data source for name, address and any other fields that are changed according to the recipient. Once you create the data source, you have to edit it by adding recipient name and addresses. Alternatively, this option allows you to use an existing address database for data source. For this, you have to open an existing data from Excel or any other database from a hard disk location. Once you complete this step, the word will ask you to save the document and a set of new tools will appear on the menu. Click on the "Insert Merge Field" and you can add the existing fields from database can be inserted into the main document.
3. Now click on the "Merge" button that is newly appeared on the menu and your document will be merged to a new document (if you choose new document option) with the addresses from the database. For eg., if you have 40 different addresses the document or letter has to be sent, the merge will create 40 documents or letters with different recipient names and address.

Mail merge is an excellent utility when you consider sending Invitations, Greetings etc. It saves you lot of time and effort that is required for sending documents in hard copy to a large number of recipients. The facility to use an external database for merging makes it more convenient.