Chapter 11: Creating Form Letters and Labels

Overview

In this chapter you will learn to:

• Understand mail merge.

• Prepare the variable data.

• Prepare the form letter.

• Merge the data with the form letter.

• 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. For example, The Garden Company might want to send a letter to everyone on a customer list to advertise the products, services, and classes being introduced to celebrate a new gardening season. The easiest way to generate a set of documents that are identical except for certain information—such as the name, address, and greeting of a letter—is 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 wizard or toolbar in Microsoft Office Word 2003 to easily produce a set of personalized documents and mailing labels.

In this chapter, you will produce a personalized form letter addressed to a specific set of customers. You’ll use the Mail Merge Wizard to add a name and address to a mailing list, and you’ll sort and filter the list to extract the customers you want to communicate with. You’ll then set up the form letter for merging, and preview and save the merged results. Finally, you’ll create and print mailing labels for each customer.

See Also

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

Important

On The CD 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-ROM” on page xiii for more information.