hello everyone and welcome to this tutorial video on how to mail merge in Word now mail merge is something that's been a part of word for many many years I can remember using it way back in the late 90s so it's definitely something that's clearly still useful as it continues to be included in later releases of word and in this video I just want to show you very quickly how you can do a quick mail merge and if you're not sure what mail merge is it's basically a way of creating letters envelopes labels or even emails in bulk so if you have a list of five hundred contacts stored off in Excel somewhere and you want to send a letter out the same letter to all of those contacts mail merge makes it super simple to create 500 letters that are personalized to each person in your contact list and that's exactly what we're gonna do in this video and what you can see on the screen here is that I've already created a very rough basic letter now you don't have to start from a letter you could start from a blank document or any document that you wish but we're going to mail merge letters in this case so I've got my letter open I'm going to jump up to this mailings ribbon at the top and you'll see that we have a group called start mail merge and the first button in this group I'm going to click it and you can see there we have a choice we need to select what we're merging so I'm doing letters now it looks like nothing has actually happened which is essentially correct but we then need to move on to selecting our recipients so it kind of goes start mail merge then you select your recipients let's click the drop-down now I have three options in here I could choose to type my list of recipients so if I didn't have them stored off somewhere else and I would say this is probably better if the list of recipients isn't particularly long so maybe if you have 10 to 15 people that you want to send this less - you could definitely do it this way and you would go in and you would start typing in that information manually so on and so forth now the corns that you see here it says title first name last name so on and so forth those are completely customizable you do have a customized columns option at the bottom so if you want to add different columns you have the option of doing that in there alternatively you can delete out any columns that you don't need so you can type your list of contacts essentially on the fly now we're not going to do that what we're going to do is we're going to go up to select recipients and we're going to say use an existing list now I have all of my contact details so their names their dresses stored off in an Excel spreadsheet and that is what we're going to use you also see that I do have a third option just I can choose from my Outlook contacts as well but we're going to use an existing list so now I need to browse and find where my list is stored and I can see it just here contact list dot xlsx it's an Excel spreadsheet I'm going to select it click on open and it's asking me now which sheets are my contact names address is located on so by default when you create a new Excel spreadsheet it's gonna give you three sheets and I know that my contacts are stored on sheet 1 I also know that the first row of my data contains column headings now if I want to very quickly check that spreadsheet and I can see there I don't have too many contacts in this example you may have hundreds but I've got about eight or so just there I can see that yes I do have headings and I can see that those contacts are in fact located on sheet one so quick double-check there just to make sure that the options I'm selecting for my mail merge are correct I'm gonna say ok now again it doesn't look like it's done a great deal now I do have an option here of editing my recipient list so if I click Edit recipient list is going to show me all of those contacts in Excel which have now essentially been attached to word and if I didn't want to maybe include all of my contacts so maybe this letter doesn't need to go out to absolutely everybody I could come in here and I could uncheck the people but I don't want to send this letter to now I do want to send it to everyone so I'm going to make sure that they're all selected you also have some other options down here for refining your recipient lists if you want to do things like sort them into alphabetical order if you want to filter out certain contacts maybe you want to find any duplicate entries you can definitely do that from down here as well so if you need to make any edits to your recipient list once you've attached it jump into edit recipients list I'm going to click OK because I don't need to make any changes and now what we need to do is we need to insert merge fields into the letter and that is where this next group comes in so this right in insert fields group we have an address block option we have a greeting line option and we have an insert merge field option so let's start out with this address block field and you can see here the screen tip says that this will add an address to your letter and you can specify the formatting and where you place that address block within your letter so in general when it comes to letter writing most of the time you will have the address at the top of the letter so I'm going to move my mouse to the top of my letter and I'm going to click address block now it's asking me what format do you want the addresses to appear in so for all of my contacts and you can see them in a preview over here and I can scroll through them these are all of my contacts from my Excel spreadsheet I can choose how I want this name to be formatted so if I just want to show their first name I could do that or I can show their full name and if they have anything like junior or senior afterwards I can also include those so very important that you select the format that you're looking for and I'm also including to insert the postal address and if you don't want to you can remove that completely now my contacts don't have a company name but if they did I would probably want to ensure that I've got the insert company name option also selected and then finding the bottom very important format the address according to the destination country region so I'm locating the United Kingdom which has a very different address format - somewhere like the United States so I want to make sure that I'm using the correct format for my country so I'm going to have a quick scroll through this preview just to make sure my addresses are looking good which they are and I'm going to click on OK and you can see there it's inserted that address block so I might want to come in and make a few little formatting changes I want to give this less or more space but I essentially have my address and I can use these arrows at the top in this preview results group to scroll through the different addresses just to see what those are going to look like when we complete our merge now if I click on this preview results button you can see it toggles me between the actual results and the field that I've inserted so when I turn preview results off it's just showing me that address block field at the top there but I'm gonna say preview results now the next thing I might want to add is some kind of greeting line so I might want to say dear Vickie or to Miss Matthews something along those lines so back to our merge fields and we're gonna insert a greeting line and this is where you get to specify the greeting line format so you can have deer or you can have two I'm gonna select deer and then you can select if you wanted to say mr. Randol if you want the full name so on and so forth and again you get a preview of what yours is going to look like underneath so you can see if I change this option it says dear Vickie Matthews I'm gonna go with dear Miss Matthews I click on OK now finally another cool thing that you can do here is that you can insert the individual fields wherever you like in your document so if we read through this paragraph of this letter it says thank you for your recent inquiry now I might want to personalize this letter even more by saying thank you Vicky for your recent inquiry so all I need to do is go to the point within the letter where I want to add my merge field and then I jump up to my right and insert fields group and if I click the drop down underneath insert merge fields it's going to show me all the merge fields I have access to and these are essentially all of the column headings from my source document from my spreadsheet and now I can choose which one or which ones I want to use so I could say just first name so that's gonna say Thank You Vicky alternatively I could say thank you at the title miss space and then add the last name space so thank you Miss Matthews for your recent inquiry now for my letters that's a bit too formal I just want the first name in there so I'm going to utilize that first name field and again if I talk all preview results you'll see what that looks like because we're seeing those merge films within our letter and that is pretty much it we've set up a document as we want it to be now all we need to do is finish our merge which essentially is going to generate this litter personalized to everybody in my contact list so the final option is finish and merge now if you want to print these letters immediately you can select that document or you can choose to send email messages now for what I'm doing I want to see all of the letters on the screen before I decide if I want to print them or if I want to email them so I'm gonna say edit individual documents I'm gonna say merge all records and click on OK and now what I get if I scroll down here is my first letter which is personalized to Vicky and if I scroll down you'll see that I get the next which is now personalized to Ben the next one is for Ryan so on and so forth so it's created all of my letters on mass for me saved me so much time by utilizing that mail merge feature in Word now as I mentioned at the beginning you can mail merge for lots of different things not just letters you can mail merge email addresses envelopes and labels as well I will be covering some of these in later video tutorials but for now that's it that is how you mail merge in Word I hope that was useful to you and I will see you in the next tutorial if you're not a subscriber click down below to subscribe so you get notified about similar videos we upload to get four free courses in Excel QuickBooks Microsoft Project and Photoshop click over there and click over there to see more videos from Simon Says it