Word Processor FAQs

 

David Lam

Q1 My boss wants me to send a seminar invitation letter to 2000 professors. All he gave me is a MS Excel file containing their addresses. Is there any quick way to generate a letter for all these 2000 guests?

A1 You can use the Mail Merge function in MS Word to generate these 2000 letters. Just follow the procedure below:

1. Start a new document in MS Word. Select from the Menu Bar.
2. The Mail Merge Helper will be displayed.
3. Under 1. Main Document, click .
4. Choose Form Letters as the document type.
5. Click to use the current blank document as the Form Document.
6. Under 2. Data Source, click .
7. Choose Open Data Source.
8. Choose the given MS Excel spreadsheet as the data source and open it.
9. The Mail Merge Tool Bar will be displayed.
10. Enter the content of your invitation letter on the Form Document.
11. At the appropriate spot, click to insert the Address field for the recipient's address.
12. Click on the Mail Merge Tool Bar to bring up the Mail Merge Helper again.
13. Under 3. Merge the Data with the Document, click to merge the Data Source to the Form Document.

Q2 I have a MS Word table with 15000 student records. I want to use Mail Merge to generate a letter to a particular class of 70 students. How should I proceed?

A2 In MS Word, you can Filter part of a data source before doing a Mail Merge. You can follow the procedure below:

1. Create a new or open an existing Form Document.
2. Open the MS Word document containing your student record table.
3. In the Mail Merge Helper, click to bring up the Query Options Window.
4. First, select the Field you want to use to filter the records. For example, the field 'Class'.
5. Select the Comparison method. For example, Equals To in this case.
6. Enter the Value used to compare with the Field Value. For example, 544016.
7. You can use And / Or to combine more than one criteria.
8. After defining the Filtering Criteria, perform Mail Merge as usual.

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