Mail Merge Memories In Word

In today's highly sophisticated world of technology, information can be passed from one person to another in the blink of an eye via such media as email and text messaging. Amidst this frenetic to-and-fro of data, however, there is room still for a more sedate mode of information transportation; a cruise liner in a world of supersonic aircraft, so to speak. I am, of course, referring to those hand-delivered packets commonly, if somewhat unkindly, referred to as snail mail.

The advantages of email over its more slothful counterpart are so many that the Royal Mail recently reported a fall in the number of letters and parcels being delivered each day of some 9 million compared to three years ago, and the trend is expected to continue.

But, as I said, there is still a place for hand-delivered mail services in today's hectic world of communications - after all, the whole world is not online and hard copy items such as newsletters, membership cards and job application forms sometimes have to be sent out in envelopes. In these situations, Mail Merge is a fantastic tool to have at your disposal.

Let me pass on some of the many useful tips I picked up when I worked in the print room of a busy mailing house where I printed letters using Mail Merge in Word on a daily basis. I worked with huge databases, setting fields for the name and address of the recipient, and the salutation. The client provided the text of the letter and the signature at the bottom.

The first thing I always did was to make sure that the fonts matched. The body text of the letter we had been provided with was written in Ariel, but the address and salutation were in Times New Roman, the default of the computer in the print room. This led to the printing of the letters with 'Dear Mrs Smith' being in one font, and the following text in another. Whereas this discrepancy was quite acceptable to some of my colleagues, I took it to be a sign of laziness that might be frowned upon by the client so I always matched the fonts before printing. It only took a minute to do and it made a far more professional looking end product and, as the client very probably had mystery shoppers in operation to check the punctuality and quality of the letters, it could also have boosted our standing.

The computer I was using could send to more than one printer, so I would divide the merge between them, thus saving a lot of time. There were ten laserjet printers in the room so, with databases sometimes consisting of over ten thousand names, I broke the merge up into bite-sized pieces. I would merge names 1-200 on printer 1, 201-400 on printer 2 and so on, and by the time I had sent 1801-2000 to printer 10, the first 200 were almost complete and I could resume with 2001-2200 on that printer.

One area where I learned from my own mistake was when I checked the first letter of a new run and all looked fine, although the signature was very close to the client's address details that were already printed at the bottom of the stationery they had supplied. What I hadn't noticed was that this test page had only a four-line address at the top. I set the printer running but soon noticed that, where an address had six lines, the signature was pushed down into the address details at the bottom of the page. I immediately stopped the run and moved everything up the page a little, then printed a test page with a maximum six-line address to ensure that the text was not pushed too far down the page. So when you are printing a test letter, be sure to check that all of the available fields are used as the text will move up and down the page as addresses of different lengths are printed.

Although Mail Merge can be used with email, the experiences I have detailed above relate to the printing of letters in Word, where different rules apply. It is such a useful tool, however it is used, that looking into it in more detail, perhaps through a training course, would be a beneficial step.