Matching Data Fields for a Mail Merge

Video Transcript

"Hi, I am Gary for expertvillage. Now that we have selected our database, before we start to use it, we need to match the fields. In other words, we have to make sure the fields that we use, since we brought in an outside database, we need to make sure the fields that we use in our database are the same ones that will be identified by Microsoft Word. So, we want to go in and click on the next step, and we see here now from our database, we have different options, what to put into our letter. We have here an address block, which is the address of the person who we are writing to. It's usually, just as a formal letter, usually put the name and address on top. So here we have, if we click on address block, we have a lot of different options on how that address block should look. We have the option to include the company name or we have the option to put the first name, last name, Mr. beforehand and we can select all those different options and here we have a preview of how the address is going to look and then we would hit ok, it would go into our letter wherever our cursor is positioned. I click cancel because I don't want to put the address block in just yet. What I want to do is, I want to match up my fields, as I discussed before. The way we do that, is we go to more items and we see all of our fields listed here. As long as we have on top, selected database fields, we see the fields, the names that we created in our database. So now I am going to match them up with the names that Microsoft Word uses. So, we see in the last name, there's nothing matched to the last name, so there would be nothing to go into that field. So I am going to choose from my list of names, contact last name. And now, Microsoft Word knows that anytime that I put in contact last name, it should pull the field of the last name. In other words, now the database is relational to the Microsoft Word field names. So, I just click on each item that I have in my database, like city and state and now it knows which information to pull up from my database. So, I created my contact last name will pertain to the Microsoft Word last name and the city and state. In my database, I had an amount of money that each person was going to be charged, that was mentioned into this particular letter. So there is not any specific field name for the amount of money, so I create a unique identifier and I'm going to give it the name of my donation amount. So now, when I put it into my letter I can put in the donation amount, it will be associated with that unique identifier. All of these fields are going to go into where I have the red asterisks, that's where the field names are going to be inserted. "