Introduction

Whether you are looking to personalize your annual Christmas letter to friends and family, or prepare a direct-mail marketing piece to 10,000 customers of your business, Word's new Mail Merge Wizard is up to the task. To perform a mail merge, you need a form letter that contains the text you want to send out, plus merge fields for the information that you want to use to personalize each letter, such as the recipient's address, first name in the greeting line, and so forth. These fields can be added manually, or as part of the Mail Merge Wizard process.

You must have a data document that contains all of this information in either comma or tab delimited format. Most databases, such as Outlook and Access, can automatically export into this format. Alternately, you can manually create a data document if you do not have an existing database of contact information that you can use for the merge. Equipped with these two sources, the Mail Merge Wizard can quickly and easily create thousands of personalized letters , address labels, and envelopes, in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take you to do these tasks .