2. One very useful feature of Microsoft
Office is the Mail Merge feature.
As an example of its use, suppose you
want to send out application letters for a
job, and you want to send them to many
companies, but have them customized
for each recipient.
3. In particular, suppose you have created
the following form letter in Word:
4.
5. But this is really just a template that
you’d like to be able to customize for
each company you’re sending this to.
Suppose further that you have the
contact information for the companies
you’re applying to in a table in an
Access database:
6.
7. To create the customized form letters
you want, you can either start from
Access or from Word, with the
corresponding Access table or Word
document open.
8. In Access, do Tools => Office Links =>
Merge It with MS Word.
In Word, do Tools => Mail Merge …
9. The first thing you need to do is modify the
Word document (called the main document)
to tell it where the field values from the
Access table records go. (The Access table
is called the data source.)
To do this, use the Insert Merge Field on the
Mail Merge toolbar for each such place in the
document.
The result looks like this:
11. The field names that are to be used from
each record in the table are displayed
between double angle brackets.
To see what actually gets inserted, record
by record, click the <<abc>> button.
Here is what the letter looks like when the
first record is used:
12.
13. Use the arrow keys on the toolbar to
see what the corresponding result is
like for each record in the table.
When you are satisfied all the letters,
you can then use the Merge… button to
either send all the letters to the printer
or create a single Word document
containing all the letters.
14.
15. Notes
Mail Merge can also use a Word table rather
than an Access table as the data source.
Mail Merge can also use an Access query
rather than a table. This is clearly more
useful if, for example, you only want to send
letters to some of the companies in your
database, or if the data you want to merge
comes from multiple tables in your database.
