Anatomy of a Mail Merge

LINC Project * Welfare Law Center | 275 Seventh Ave #1205, New York, NY 212-633-6967 | www.lincproject.org |

ANATOMY OF A DATA MERGE

A data merge (also known as a mail merge) has three parts:

1)  A data source

2)  A template (Word calls this the “Main Document”)

3)  A merged document

Any self-respecting word processor (Word, OpenOffice.org, Word Perfect) includes a wizard to help you create data merges, but it is worth knowing a bit about what the pieces are.

1) Data Source: a table that contains the information -- names, addresses, phone numbers -- that will be pulled into a data merge. Your data source might have been exported from your database or it might be a spreadsheet that someone typed up by hand. Each person whose information will be included in the data merge gets their own horizontal row in the spreadsheet. Each field, or type of information that you’re importing, gets its own column in the spreadsheet. You can use the first row as a header row, with titles for each column.

A simple data source might look something like this:

FirstName

LastName

City

State

Zip

If you’re using Microsoft Word and Outlook, you can also use your Outlook contacts as a data source for email merges.

2) Template: a document that you create in Word or another word processor, into which the information from your data source will be inserted. The template or “main document” could be a form letter, a template for labels, or any document that you want to populate with information from a data source. You can save your template and re-use it later; for example, your organization might use a standard setup for mailing labels or a thank you letter that you’d save so that you could use it again in later data merges.

To create a template or main document, create a normal letter or mailing label using placeholders, or “field names,” rather than the actual data that you plan to insert from the data source. If you are planning to use the data source above, your main document might look like this:

3) Merged Document: the result of a data merge. The information from the data source replaces the placeholder field labels in your template or main document. Using the data source and main document above, we’d come up with this merged document:

You can work with a merged document the way you would any other word processor document, making final changes or edits before you print your merged document. Just remember that the edits you make to one letter or label in your merged document won’t be automatically applied to the rest of the letters or labels– you'll need to make the edits manually for each letter or label in your merged document that you want to change. If you need to make a universal change to all labels or letters, just go back to your template/main document, make the changes there, and create a new merged document that includes those changes.

FORMATTING YOUR DATA MERGE

Most word processors will make data merges miles easier than they seem here. To create a data merge in MS Word, first make sure you know where your data source is. Then look in the ”tools” menu for something that says “Mail Merge Manager” or “Data Merge Manager” or “Envelopes and Labels...” (It varies dramatically by version of MS Office.)

Whatever it is called in your word processor, you'll get a window or toolbox that you can use to walk through creating your template and placing fields into it. You'll also be able to access “word fields” that will let you do tricky and complex things with your merged document.

Some indispensable Word Fields:

The <Next Record> word field is a placeholder that tells Word that, after this point, it should start filling in data from the next available record in the data source.

“Skip Record If ...” will walk you through a logical statement that will skip the next record if, say, the city field is blank, or the state field is not NY.

“If ... Then ... Else” will help you set up a logical statement like “If the state is NY then include this text in the form letter, else include this other text.” A pop-up wizard will guide you through the particulars of creating your “If ... then ... else” statement.

Tinker with Word Fields – they allow you to automate many tasks in your data merge, giving you options for creating all sorts of documents with ease.

Created by the LINC Project of the Welfare Law Center and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.