
How to insert mail merge fields in Open Office, learn more about mail merge features in Microsoft Word, Excel, and Open Office in this free instructional video.
All Videos In The Series, "How to Do a Mail Merge in Microsoft Word & Open Office"
"Hi, I'm Gary for Expert Village. Now that we've put in our address block we want to go ahead and put in our fields into the letter, the rest of our merge fields. We see here, like the name, the person, the name who it's going to be addressed to, in the dear space in the letter. Now the reason why when we go to edit our document and it puts in the names in the address block is because the, it is already looking in to the database that we selected and it's taking the names from the database. So as we scroll through we see that all those names are there but we still need to put in to the document, the rest of the fields because nothing is linked to it in there and obviously if we don't put any of the fields in no information is going to be put there. The way we do that is we're going to go into the edit our document and once we're there we're going to see that our Mail Merge Wizard on the top left hand corner has been minimized and so if we want to go back to the wizard we just go ahead a click on it. But right now what we're gonna do is we're gonna insert our fields. So I'm going to make sure where ever my cursor is, I'm going to put it over where I want to enter that field. So now this is where I want to put in my names. And I go up top and I click on insert and there's a menu option there that says fields and if we go down, even though we see these things, some of these might be helpful to insert into our document, we can also insert them but what we want to do is click on other. And we're going to go to the end where it says database. Now that's going to call up our database that we're using for this document and then we'll be able to select the fields that we have in our database. So I click on Mail Merge fields and I see sample data which is the database for my letter and I also see the table that was created in our database and here are my fields. So I can go ahead and click on one of them and then click on insert, making sure that the cursor is in the right place in the body of the letter. So here I want dear to the first name and I highlight first name, click insert, it will go into that space in the letter similarly to what we did in Word and that will take all of my contact first names and put it into that spot into the letter. And I'm going to do the same thing where I have written the city, the space that I left open for city. I'm going to make sure that my cursor is in the right spot and then I'm going to go up into my database fields and choose contact city and insert and I'll do the same thing where the money amounts, which was called donation amount, and we're going to insert and now the proper fields are inserted into my letter. And once I go to my last step of merging the document those, that information that's contained in the database will go into the proper place in my master letter."
Expert Village: Gary Zier
Video Series: Computers
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