Entering Data Lists to Mail Merge Documents

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Gary for Expert Village. Now once we have our data, let's see how to work with it. There is a lot of different options that we need to be sure of before we put our data into the letter. First we see that we have all of our fields here. Those fields have to be matched up with the fields inside the Microsoft Word program. In other words, when I created my database, I created contact, last name but that is not necessarily what the Microsoft Word will recognize it as. So one thing we have to do when we work with our database, we have to make sure our fields are matched up and all of our fields that have check marks are those are the ones from our database that are going to be put into our letter. Now, we might have a database and we might say well, this guy doesn't need a letter or he got a letter last week so here you can pick and choose people from your database are going to receive the document, the mail merge that you are creating. You don't have to pick everything. You can pick and choose and these are the fields that are going to to into letter note. See here the check notes next to blank fields? What is going to happen is when the information when we click on the end, when we put the information into our letter, these fields are going to be blank because there is no information there and so all of these fields that we see here are going to create blank pages from our document. The document will be there but the fields will be empty. So instead of taking those blank check marks out of those fields, the easiest thing to do because we only have a few names that we want to use is to clear all and everything will be empty and it will be much easier to check the ones that we want instead of going all the way down the list and unchecking everything. So this is the first thing we are going to do with our database is select our recipients and that will help us save some time later on when we go ahead and print our letters. So you see here that our database is selected; that's the name of our file and we are ready for our next step. "