By John Woram
(November 16, 2005)

E-mail may be the king of communication, but firing off electronic holiday greetings to friends and family is a little, well, tacky.

Addressing stacks of cards doesn't have to be a chore. You might not realize you have an electronic solution right at your fingertips to eliminate hours of hand-cramping addressing: mail merge. This little Microsoft Word feature can take the drudgery out of mass mailings. However, if you've ever tried it, you may have found the procedure unintuitive.

We'll walk you step by step through the wizard, with our step numbers coinciding with those of mail merge, to demystify its head-scratching complexity.

Mailing lists made easy

Before you get started with this project, we recommend that you have the following:

Mailing lists made easy

Open Microsoft Word and select Tools > Letters And Mailings > Mail Merge.

A Task pane will pop up on the right-hand side of the document window. At the bottom of the screen, you should see step 1 of 6. (If you see step 2 or greater, click Previous to return to step 1.) At the top of the pane, click the Labels radio button and hit Next: Starting Document.

Mailing lists made easy

At the top of the Task pane, click the Change Document Layout radio button, then click Label Options.

In the dialog box, select Manual Paper Feed for laser or inkjet printers, then select the product number for your labels. You'll find it on the labels' packaging. If it's not listed, check the cross-reference sheet in the package for an alternate product number.

To double-check if everything's correct, note the dimensions in the Label Information section. They are expressed in the same units (such as inches, points, or picas) that Word uses on its ruler bars; check them against your label stock.

Once you select the label type, click OK, and you'll see a series of grids in your document to indicate the boundaries of each label. (If the grids are missing, select Show Gridlines from the Table menu.) Now click Next: Select Recipients.

Mailing lists made easy

If you want to use your Outlook contacts, just click the "Select from Outlook contacts" radio button. If you already have some sort of mailing list compiled in another application, such as Microsoft Excel, you can link to this data within mail merge.

But keep in mind that mail merge reads the data by column, so if you've combined info into single columns, such as the street address with the city and state (which must go on separate lines on the label), you'll have to do some renovation work on your list. In our case, we had also typed recipients' names in one column as Last, First. As a result, we had to separate street addresses, last names, and first names into separate columns. Make sure you use column headers, too, so that mail merge can properly match the fields on the label with the columns in your file.

For an existing list in an application such as Excel, click the "Use an existing list" radio button, then click Browse to find and select your file. The Select Table dialog box appears, showing your filename followed by a dollar sign. Make sure the box "First row of data contains column headers" is checked. Then click the OK button to display the Mail Merge Recipients dialog box.

Here you can sort or filter your list to print or not print certain labels--zip codes within a certain range, recipients in certain states, and so on. Just select Edit Recipient List, click a down-arrow button in one of the header columns, and select (Advanced...) to open the Filter And Sort dialog box.

Use the multiple options within the dialog box to filter the list the way you want. When you're done, click OK to close the dialog box. The Word document window should show a blinking cursor within the first label grid, and all other grids should display a Next Record tag. (Mail-merge fields in Word are denoted by double chevrons.) Click "Next: Arrange your labels."

To prevent Excel from deleting leading zeroes from your zip codes, highlight your zip-code column and select Format > Cells. On the Numbers tab, select Special > Zip Code, then click OK.

Mailing lists made easy

Click Address Block to open the Insert Address Block dialog box; verify that the information to be printed is in the format you want. Next, click the Match Fields button and make sure all the column headers coincide with the proper fields on the label. Make any necessary changes, then click OK.

An «AddressBlock» tag should appear within the first label grid. Click the down arrow in the Task pane, if necessary, to see the Update All Labels button; select it to display «Next Record»«AddressBlock» within each of the other grids. Click "Next: Preview your labels" to review the names and addresses on your labels before printing them. The names and addresses of your mail recipients should appear within the label grids.

If necessary, select Edit Recipient List to make changes. Should any of the information on your labels appear out of order, go back to step 4 and make any necessary corrections. Click "Next: Complete the merge."

Mailing lists made easy

Your mailing list is now ready to be printed. If the list contains more names than can fit on a single page, the Word Status bar may erroneously report a one-page document. If so, click Edit Individual Labels to open the "Merge to new document" dialog box and select the All option.

In Word's File menu, select Print Preview to verify that all the labels are ready to be printed. Print a sample page on plain paper to make sure that everything's OK before you take a chance with a sheet of label stock. Once it's printed, place the test page over the label stock and hold both up to the light to make sure the address blocks are properly aligned with the labels.

If you're printing several sheets of labels, don't load more than two or three sheets for the first print run, to make sure your printer can handle the label stock without jamming. Depending on the printer's paper-handling capability, you may need to feed the sheets one at a time.

You can also use mail merge to print a sheet of return-address labels. Complete steps 3 and 4, then type your return address within the first label grid. When you get to step 5, browse to a list of recipients and select it (even though you're not going to use it). Then proceed to step 6 and click Update All Labels. This copies your return address into each label grid. Just ignore the «Next Record» tag within each label grid and proceed through steps 7 and 8 to complete the job.