Making Mail Merge Easier

Using Microsoft Word to create mail merges in the past has been difficult if you didn’t know the procedure.

You would have to use the Mail Merge helper, a seemingly 3 step tool, which in reality has more then 3 steps,

Step 1 choose the template or document
Step 2 select the data source ( where the contacts were coming from )
back to Step 1 edit the document
Step 3 could be done in the helper or there was a button on the mail merge toolbar so you quite the helper.

If you didn’t mail merge often, then it was a tad confusing. I used to mail merge quite a lot at one time and found the mail merge helper got in my way.  I have met a lot of people who mail merged often who loved the helper but realise that it didn’t make sense when asked what they had to do. Then in Microsoft changed how it merged forever.

For the people who knew how to mail merge it created a simple toolbar ( ribbon in version 2007 )and for those people who did not merge often it created the mail merge wizard.  A step by step guide to creating a merged document.  The order is logical and you can go through the entire wizard without having to return to a previous step, but if you made a mistake and needed to, you could return to a previous step and fix a problem.

The wizard is housed in a task pane,which is a bar usually down the right side of the window and can be dragged all over the screen and docked ( attached ) to each side, top or bottom of the window.

Once finished the mail merge wizard helps you to merge your document and sits in the original document ready to be used again.

Mail Merge Crib sheet found here http://www.katherinedavison.co.uk/products-page/microsoft-word-2003/easy-mail-merge-crib-sheet.
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