Office 2007 Bible

Performing a Mail Merge from Your Contacts

Mail merge is a technique that lets a form letter be addressed and sent to many different individuals. It can also be used to create mailing labels, envelopes, and catalogs such as a mailing list. Microsoft Office has merge tools built into several of its applications, most notably Word, and Outlook is included in this list.

When would you use Outlook to perform a mail merge? Only when the names and addresses that you want to use are in your Outlook address book. In this situation, using Outlook is often the simplest approach. Even so, some factors may mitigate against using Outlook for a merge and instead using the more advanced mail merge tools available in other Office applications. For example, Outlook cannot separate documents by ZIP code to get reduced mailing rates, and it would not be a good choice for a large merge that will create thousands of documents. You need to have Microsoft Word installed on your system to perform a mail merge.

The first step in performing a mail merge is usually to filter your contacts so that only the ones you want included are shown. You can do this by using Outlook’s search capability or by customizing the Contacts view, both of which are covered earlier in this chapter. However, you can skip this step and select the contacts to include later. Then, follow these steps:

1.	Make sure that Contacts are active.
2.	Choose Mail Merge from the Tools menu. Outlook displays the Mail Merge dialog box, as shown ...