Previewing a Mail Merge Letter

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Gary for ExpertVillage. Okay, now that our fields are inside the body of our letter, let's go ahead and preview the letters. And this is going to insert all of our data into the fields, into the main letter, but it's not going to finalize it. In other words, changes can still be made, but we see now what our address block looked like. We see the first name and last name with the address and the city and state, just like we chose it and I made a sample of the greeting line. We see here, I put it above but it also formatted according to the selections we made with the first name and last name without a title. And, the program also went ahead and inserted the name of the city to each letter and, also, the price and our dollar sign is there, which we also inserted. So, now we can see, pretty much, what the letter looks like. We can go ahead and scroll through each letter in the letter that was created. In other words, each entry in our database we can go ahead and click down and scroll through each letter in case we want to make a correction. Let's say we find out this person doesn't live in this particular city and we want to change it. So we can scroll through, again the changes that we are making as we scroll through, nothing has been finalized. So, this is the point where we can edit all of this information. So, here we see we went back and we can go into the letter to make corrections. See, I deleted the extra greeting field because we really don't need it. We saw what it looked like and now we see that we are able to make those changes and we can, again, just go through each individual letter. We see that my added greeting line has gone away because I took it out and I can, again, go ahead and scroll through. So nothing, at this point, has been finalized until we actually do the final merge and even at that point, we always have this file ready to make changes, even after we merge."