Inserting Mail Merge Fields in Microsoft Word: Part 2

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Introduction

How to insert mail merge fields in Microsoft Word for a mail merge; learn more about mail merge features in Microsoft Word, Excel, and Open Office in this free instructional video.

By: Gary Zier

Source: Expert Village

Length: 2:40

Comments: 0

Tags: computers software

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All Videos In The Series, "How to Do a Mail Merge in Microsoft Word & Open Office"

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Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Gary for Expert Village. And we see the "Contact First Name" field appear, so I go ahead and close my list of fields. And now I go, I need to put a comma after the "contact first name" 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 I see on the bottom 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 create the field. So I close it up and I click on "more items" and I find my "contact city." I'm going to insert that. It's going to go exactly where the cursor is. And now I can go in and when I merge all of the names of the cities are going to be in there. Make sure it's lined up properly and the last thing we wanted to do was to create a unique field which is the cost, which is a monetary value. So, we are going to go, I called it in my database a "donation amount." And Microsoft Word knows which field to match that up with. And now we are going to close that and I'm going to make sure there's a dollar sign and a period afterwards because it's 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 of the proper fields into my letter. Now that we've inserted our merge fields, I'm going to just 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. And we see that in the first option we can choose "Dear..." There's a drop-down there with 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 the 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. It will be an extra "greeting line," but just to show you what it looks like, we'll put it above the "dear" line."

eHow Article: Inserting Mail Merge Fields in Microsoft Word: Part 2

Expert Village: Gary Zier

Video Series: Computers

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