Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003

Understanding Mail Merges

Mail merges are used to create personalized documents that seem to have been written individually, even though copies of the document are generated for many different recipients. For example, Outlook can supply each recipient's first name or nickname for a greeting field in a merge document.

Mail merges are used to create documents that take information from a data source such as an Outlook address book, an Excel worksheet, or an Access database and place the information in a Word document. Of course, in this book the focus is on using Outlook information, so the Word instruction is limited to that context. In this chapter, the word document is used to refer to any type of output you generate, whether the output is a ...