Inserting Mail Merge Fields in Microsoft Word: Part 1

"Hi, my name is Gary with expertvillage. Now that we have matched up our database with the proper fields, let’s go ahead and start inserting them into the body of our letter. So, the first thing we want to do is, I'm going to show you how to make an address block and when we put it into the letter, it's going to where our cursor is. So I am going to move my cursor up over here, just so I have enough space to put the address block in and I'll show you an example of how it would look. We go into our menu and we can pick and choose how we want the address to look and it could be on a first name, last name, or Mr. and we also have other options for putting in the full address and whatever we choose, we see that on the bottom we are going to have a preview of how it is going to look in the letter. So, for this letter I think I'll just go ahead and choose the standard first name, last name and here we see how it's going to look and I won't include the company name. I'm going to check to make sure that everything is matched up, last name is matched, contact last name, contact first name. So, everything is set over there. I hit ok. Now, my address block is set to when I, in the end, choose to merge the fields, all of those fields will go into the address block appropriately. Now, the next thing that we want to do is we want to go ahead to add fields to the body of the letter. So here, I have the Dear so and so and I can go ahead and choose exactly how I want that to appear. If I want it just to be the first name, if I wanted the first name, last name, I'm going to go ahead and select the fields from my database. I make sure my cursor is in the right place and I click on more items and here I see all my fields that I can insert. So, I'm going to go ahead and over here, next to the Dear I'm going to choose the ContactFirstName. So it'll just be like Dear Joe and on a first name basis and we see the ContactFirstName field appear so I go ahead and close my list of fields and now I need to put a comma after the ContactFirstName because everything is going to appear the same exact way in the letter as we see it here. So I go ahead and put the comma there and now on the bottom I see that I have a field where I wanted to put the city of where the representative is going to be visiting. So, I have to close up my text over here so it doesn't create any gaps when I put in the field. So I close it up and I click on more items and I find my ContactCity. I'm going to insert that, it's going to go exactly where the cursor is and now I can, when I merge, all the names of the cities are going to be in there. Make sure it is lined up properly and the last thing that we wanted to do is we created a unique field which was the cost, which was a monetary value. So, we are going to go, I called it in my database, it was a donation amount and Microsoft Word knows what field to match that up with and now we are going to close that and I'm going to make sure there is dollar sign, a period afterwards because it is the end of a sentence and, also, a dollar sign beforehand just so when it goes into the letter, the dollar sign will appear before all of the donation amounts and that will import all the proper fields into my letter. Now, that we have inserted our merged fields, I'm going to show you the option of inserting a greeting line. A greeting line is, instead of us putting in the fields next to Dear so and so, we actually create the line automatically. Now, we see in the first option we can choose Dear, there is a drop down there, there are some other options and then we have the name, formatting the name. So we can have a first name with a title. In other words, Mr. And the last name, Mr. Randall, in this case or we can remove the Mr. part and just put the first name or first and last name. This is similar to what we had in the address block. And, you see here, I made a little bit of a mistake, my cursor, when I inserted the greeting line, my cursor was set above, in the middle of the address block. So, when I inserted it, it went right in the middle of that field. So what I have to do, is when you insert fields, you have to make sure that the cursor is put exactly where you want it to be. So here, I already have my Dear line and I'm going to add in and it will be an extra greeting line, but just to show you what it's going to look like, we will put it above the Dear line."