Chapter 9. Creating Form Letters, E-Mail Messages, and Labels

9. Creating Form Letters, E-Mail Messages, and Labels

Chapter at a Glance

In this chapter, you will learn to:
	Understand mail merge.
	Prepare data for mail merge.
	Prepare a form letter.
	Merge a form letter with its data source.
	Send a personalized e-mail message to multiple recipients.
	Create and print labels.

Many businesses and other organizations communicate with their customers or members by means of letters, newsletters, and promotional pieces that are sent to everyone on a mailing list. The easiest way to generate a set of documents that are identical except for certain informationsuch as the name, address, and greeting of a letteris to use a process called mail merge. If you have a list of potential recipients stored in a consistent format, you can use the mail merge process to easily produce a set of personalized documents and mailing labels.

In this chapter, you will use the Mail Merge wizard to guide you through the process of creating a form letter. You will select a data source, add a record to it, sort it, and filter it. You will then add merge fields for an address and greeting line to an existing form letter, preview the merged data, exclude recipients from the merge, merge the letters into a new document, and then save the merged file. You will also set up and send a merged e-mail message. Finally, you will create and print mailing labels.

See Also

Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Quick Reference entries on pages xxxixlxiii.

Important

Before you can use the practice files in this chapter, you need to install them from the book's companion CD to their default location. See "Using the Book's CD" on page xxv for more information.

Troubleshooting

Graphics and operating systemrelated instructions in this book reflect the Windows Vista user interface. If your computer is running Microsoft Windows XP and you experience trouble following the instructions as written, please refer to the "Information for Readers Running Windows XP" section at the beginning of this book.