Mail merge

Mail Merge from Word with another source

When you want to send out personal emails via Outlook but the information itself isn’t in Outlook, then you can start your mail merge from within Word as well. The process is similar as doing a mail merge from within Word with Outlook as the source with additional step of matching the merge fields.

1. Start the mail merge from Word again as indicated above until you reach the screen with Step 3 in the Mail Merge Wizard.
2. In Step 3 select “Use an existing list”.
3. Click the Browse… button.
4. Select the location of the document containing the information. This can be Excel sheets, Access Databases, Database Queries, Text Documents and many other sources as long as it is in a structured format Word can work with. 
   Depending on the file type you selected you might need to put in the delimiters; the characters that are used to separate the columns and rules.
5. After you have selected the file and optionally filtered your contacts to address, continue to Step 4.
6. When you reach Step 4, it is a good time to match the fields from your source to Mail Merge fields to be able to use the predefined blocks such as “Greeting Line”. 
   For instance, when you have an Excel sheet that contains the columns Name, Email Address, Usernames and Passwords, you’d want to match the Name field to the “Last Name” merge field.
   1. Match the fields; 
      Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013: press the Match Fields button. 
      Word 2003: press the 10th icon from the left (labeled Match Fields) on the Mail Merge toolbar shown above.
   2. You’ll now get a dialog with standard Merge Fields in Word which can be used in standardized templates.
   3. Expand the drop down list next to “Last Name” and set it to the column in your source document (in our case an Excel sheet) containing that information (in our case the column “Name”).
   4. Match up other fields if you need and press OK to close the dialog.
7. You can now continue with the mail merge as indicated in the process above.
8. When you get to the dialog to send the messages, you must set the “To:” field to the column that contains the list of email addresses to send to.

Merge field has different font issue solution:

Method 1: Add the Charformat Switch

Edit the merge field and add the Charformat switch. To edit the merge field, follow these steps:

1. Place the insertion point in the merge field. For example, click into the field similar to the following example:
   <<FirstName>>
2. Press SHIFT+F9 to view the field code. For example, your merge field should now look similar to the following:
   { MERGEFIELD FirstName  }
3. Move the insertion point to the left of the closing (right) brace (}).
4. Add the Charformat switch so your merge field now looks similar to the following example:
   
   
   { MERGEFIELD FirstName \* Charformat  }
   NOTE: If the word "MERGEFORMAT" appears in this field, delete it and replace it with the word Charformat.
5. Select the first character following the opening field brace.
   
   For example, select the "M" within the word MERGEFIELD as in the following example:
   {MERGEFIELD FirstName \* Charformat  }
   Make sure that this character is set to the font and font size that you want. If it is not, change it to the font and font size that you want.
6. Press SHIFT+F9 to show the result of the field code.

The field does not look any different than it did before, but when you perform the merge, the correct font is used.