Mail Merge Microsoft Access Data into Microsoft Word Documents [00:00:01.08] INSTRUCTOR: Welcome to another free tutorial brought to you by AccessLearningZone.com. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to perform a mail merge using access data in a Microsoft Word document. Here I am in my Microsoft Access database. I've got a customer table that I call customer T. And it has fields like customer ID, first name, last name, company and so on. [00:00:22.92] I want to take this information and send out letters to these people using a Microsoft Word mail merge. So come up top and click on External data. And then in the export section, you'll see Word Merge. Click on that. The Microsoft Word Mail Merge Wizard starts up. [00:00:40.18] Now if you have a letter document already that you're using, you can pick link your data to an existing Microsoft Word document. Or if you haven't created the letter yet, just click on Create a New Document and then link the data to it. Hit OK. [00:00:53.67] Microsoft Word starts up into a blank document. And over here on the right, you'll see mail merge. Select the document type. What kind of document do you want to create? Well, let's pick letters. And then down here on the bottom, step one of six, click Next Starting Document. [00:01:10.74] At starting document, you want to use the current document. It starts from a template or starts from an existing document. Well, like we said earlier, we want to use the current document, all right? [00:01:20.38] Step three is now select recipients. For the list of recipients, the people who are getting this letter, you can use an existing list, select from your outlook contacts, or type in a new list. Well, we've already specified our list of customers right here, customer T in PC resale customer database. That's the database that I started with where I clicked on the Word Merge button. [00:01:44.07] You can change that here if you want to. Or if you want to edit the recipient list, in other words, if you only want to send this to specific people, you can click on Edit recipient list. Here's a list of all the people in that table. You can scroll up and down. And if there are certain people in here that you don't want to send this to, let's say you're missing addresses for some of them, I know a couple of them are missing addresses. Let's say like right here. Pete and Barbara are missing information. So I could scroll over here and say, Pete and Barbara, you're not getting a letter. When you're done, click OK. [00:02:16.32] Now the next step, write your letter. Now step four says, write your letter. If you have not already done so, write your letter now. So set's come over here to the left, and we'll start typing in our letter. [00:02:27.71] I'll start with the return address, so PCRESALE is the name of the company on 101 main street Buffalo, New York 14222. All right, enter enter. Now, I want to put the person who is receiving this letter's address. So over here notice there is something called an address block. [00:02:46.91] Now, if you use the address block, and you've named your fields, things like address, city, state, zip, you can just automatically insert an address block. But I want to skip this for now. I'm going to show you how to insert these fields manually. [00:02:58.82] Come up top here and see where it says, Insert Merge Field? Drop this down and there is a list of all the fields from your database table. All you have to do is pick them and insert them into your documents. So first name, there's a first name code. Space, drop it down, last name, Shift Enter for a line break, all right? [00:03:21.84] Next field would be address, Shift Enter city space state space postal code. And if you have foreign people getting a letter as well, you can come in here and click country underneath that. [00:03:41.39] Word is pretty good usually about generating the address block. But in case you ought to do it manually, that's how you set it up manually, enter enter. Put today's data in, so March 15th. [00:03:52.91] And now the greeting portion of the letter, I'm going to type in dear. And then I want the person's first name to appear right here. So again, insert Merge Field first name comma enter. This letter is to inform you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Type in the rest of the letter here-- sincerely Rick. So there's your letter. [00:04:21.40] Once you're finished with your letter click on Next, Preview Your Letters. Notice now there's actual data in your letter. There's Joe Jones and his address. Dear Joe is down here. You can cycle through the different recipients by clicking on these buttons here, previous and next. You'll see the sample data over here changes. When you're finished checking everything out, come down here and click on Complete the Merge. [00:04:49.67] And now you have two options. You can either print the letters directly right now as they are. Or you can edit the individual letters. Now, editing the individual letters takes all the data and merges it into the letter template and produces a document where each page is a different copy of the letter for each person that's receiving it. So if you've got 10 people, that's a one page letter. You are going to get a 10-page document. That's handy if you want to go through and put individual notes or changes on specific customers letters. [00:05:22.52] So for example, I'll click on Edit Individual Letters. You can merge specific records. I'll just pick all. And here's my new document now. But notice these are no longer merge fields. We actually created a new letter document that's got the first person. [00:05:38.30] If I scroll down, there's the second page. If I scroll down, there's the third page. And you can come in here and make individual changes. For example, let's say Susan-- all right Susan-- we talked yesterday and you said you were going to pay blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever you want to put in here. [00:05:54.78] And this will only go to Susan when you print this out. So you can make individual changes wherever you want to. Now I can save this document and print it or mail it to someone else to be printed and do whatever you want to it. [00:06:07.48] If you want to learn more about working with Microsoft Access and Word, I cover this topic and a lot more in my Microsoft Access Expert level 19 class. In this class I cover conditional formatting, exporting data to Excel and Word, exporting to text files and lots more. You can find this on my website at AccessLearningZone.com. You can find a link to this class in the description below the video. [00:06:37.45] Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, be sure to give it a thumbs up and comment below. I post new videos all the time. 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