Merging Data Records for a Mail Merge

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Gary for ExpertVillage. Now let's go ahead and do the final merge. We see that we have previewed our letters and we went through our merge fields, have been put in properly, and the information there is correct. All our commas and dollar signs and everything that we want. We can go ahead and review that and we see that the letter is in order and now we can go ahead and complete the merge. So, once we complete the merge, we have two options. We can print all the letters that were put in or we can edit individual letters. If we edit individal letters, this will not print, but it will give us, kind of like, another option to review everything and we can also go through and select which entries into our database we want to merge. In other words, if we have a large list and, let's say, we are using it for marketing material, we may not want to print. We may not want to merge all of the letters. So, we can just do the first 20 and then we can do the next 20 and this way we have time to go ahead and contact each person in the letter. So we don't have to make a final merge for all letters. So, we can, also, go back now and look through, if we go to the previous step of looking through the letters, we can actually go and see which ones we want to delete or which ones we should keep or not keep. So, then, once we find which letters we want to keep and which entries we want to merge, I selected all, so it is going to merge all of my entries. I had about seven names in there. And, now we see what that does is it creates a file and that's going to create a file with a letter or page for each entry in my database. So here, this file really consists of seven pages or seven letters and each name is there. This is actually the final letter that we are going to, that is going to be printed and going to be sent. So now, this is actually finalized, if we wanted to make changes we would have to make changes to each individual letter. Now, let's say we don't like what came out or we made a mistake in the final merge, we can go ahead and delete that merged file and then we are back into our main body of our letter where we can start editing again and start looking over other things and we can make changes and go ahead in the end do another final merge. "